


Apart

by infamouslastwords



Series: Poison Arrow [4]
Category: The Walking Dead (TV)
Genre: Alcohol, Bottom Rick Grimes, Canon Compliant, Canon Dialogue, Canon Rewrite, Canon-Typical Violence, Daryl Dixon-centric, Daryl Dixon/Rick Grimes Feels, Dubious Consent, Explicit Sexual Content, Heavy Angst, Implied/Referenced Child Abuse, Implied/Referenced Drug Use, Implied/Referenced Suicide, M/M, Mention of Daryl Dixon/Joe (Claimers), Past Lori Grimes/Rick Grimes, Past Rick Grimes/Shane Walsh, Post-Prison (Walking Dead), Presumed Dead, Reunions, Season/Series 04, Season/Series 05, Smoking, Top Daryl Dixon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-01-27
Updated: 2021-02-14
Packaged: 2021-03-13 05:27:48
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 5
Words: 31,641
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29023464
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/infamouslastwords/pseuds/infamouslastwords
Summary: "You’re gonna be the last man standing,” Beth says, a knowing wryness in her voice, like it is the best compliment she can think of giving. In truth, Daryl can think of no worse fate. Not dying, not even turning. But still being here, still dragging himself forward through it all, pointlessly. Alone in the wasteland of civilization, the infiniteness of nothing, day in and day out.Daryl presumes Rick (and everyone else) dead after the prison burns. He walks through this new world and tries to reconcile his desire to give up with the will to survive. S04E10 ~ S05E02.
Relationships: Daryl Dixon & Beth Greene, Daryl Dixon & Carol Peletier, Daryl Dixon/Rick Grimes
Series: Poison Arrow [4]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/2031406
Comments: 20
Kudos: 20





	1. The Dark

The prison is on fire.

Machine guns gutter out into the noise of it all—the metallic clanging of fences falling, of human cries, of the whoosh of oxygen disappearing around pyres, of the walkers’ distant howling, and the tank’s steady crawl up the fields toward the yard.

Above it all is Rick’s earnest voice wavering, offering clemency. Then Rick’s thigh is erupting in a spray of blood as he is hit with a bullet. Daryl sees him there, rolled behind the prison bus, yelling in agony and clutching the fast-oozing wound through the sounds of automatics going off in quick, cold succession. There is the tank tearing up the crops as it busts through the inner gates, and Daryl rolling the grenade down the length of its main gun. There is he and Beth escaping from the same herd that had surrounded Zach’s car on the run to the veterinary hospital. But then there is nothing, and the world tilts on its axis.

There is no Rick.

Daryl runs with Beth for a long time, across many miles, never looking back at the thick black smoke and red-orange tongues of fire. They run until he is sure they are on the outskirts of the herd and away. The long scrub shrubs scratch at his sweating arms, his neck, his face, dotted as they are with bright blue cornflowers. For a moment he is not even sure this is real—the breath running ragged through his burning lungs, and Beth’s long blonde ponytail swinging in front of him, and the sun so high in the sky that it seems unreasonable: seems to live outside of the laws of gravity, physics, time.

Collapsing on the other side of the overgrown pasture, in a clearing of the woods, the only sound he can hear is the scream of blood through his ears. Already the carrion crows circle above them, waiting. As if they were touched by death and therefore approaching it, inevitable enough to be a next meal.

The birds’ shadows, and the those of clouds, pass over Daryl’s face in the last day’s light.

Then it is nighttime, and he has built a fire for them. Daryl cannot remember if he has said anything to the girl sitting across from him—he thinks maybe he hasn’t. Just staring into the fire and tearing up twigs and grass alike, throwing it into the flames. Then, eventually, he stops doing even that. Sits with his wrist in the steel grip of his own hand, knees drawn up to his chest.

“We should do something,” he hears as if he is underwater, the sound coming to him from a long way off. He couldn’t say if it was the first, or tenth, time she had said it, but her words are insistent.

He finally brings his eyes to her eyes, which are locked on his face, beseeching.

“We aren’t the only survivors,” she says with a certainty that grips his heart and squeezes, threatens. “We can’t be.”

Daryl thinks back to Judith’s day of birth, and the way Carl had poured out a litany of names, ran through the things they had all called their dead. This seems from a separate life, something he had seen in a movie and briefly identified with, once, but now cannot recall the feeling of. Here, there is just emptiness in his gut, all-consuming.

_Zach. Caleb. Hershel._

Daryl looks back at the fire.

…

It is well into morning before they speak again. They are moving along a trail, and Daryl has not seen anything interesting until now. When he bends to clear some brown leaves from the footprints in the mud, Beth joins him at his side. He first makes sure they are not Rick’s, able to tell like the absence of a scent. They are not Michonne’s, nor Maggie’s, not even Carol’s—Carol, who may be alive somewhere, but has no idea that the home they shared, that she was banished from, has burned.

“Whoever they are, it means they’re alive,” Beth tells him, confident.

“No,” he responds, barely a murmur. “This means they were alive four or five hours ago.”

Daryl tries to see where they lead, eyes following the middle distance. His hair sticks to his sweaty skin, curling down over his forehead and around the cleft of his cheekbones. His eyes are starting to sting, going off like an alarm against every blink he makes to clear the salty perspiration from his eyes.

“They’re alive,” Beth says combatively, before walking away. Daryl chews his cheek, picking himself up again from the forest floor.

She stops around midday, starts pulling red grapes from a nearby vine and saying something about feeding whosever trail they are on. They have not eaten themselves, and she does this thing with a fervor. Her frantic fingers pulling at each fruit is so unlike the way Rick’s had pulled cherry tomatoes from the vine, paced and peaceful.

In the heat of the sun, Daryl closes his eyes for just a moment. He rubs them to get the sweat out and the colors whorl, made all golden brown. Daryl swears can see him there, as if it were as simple as pulling back a full tree branch to reveal the clearing—can see those deft fingers working six bullets into the cylinder of his Python, which glints in the high noon sun.

Once they find the little black shoe amongst fresh carnage and a feeding walker, Daryl knows whose tracks these are. He thinks, probably for the first and only time, that he is glad Carol is not around to see this, know this, too.

But Beth is around to see it, and know. Her howls erupt into the early afternoon air. If he lets her continue—and by proxy, lets himself feel—then Daryl will never move on from that point. He will die there with her amongst the other dead. So, he drags Beth forward, somehow. Drags himself.

_Zach. Caleb. Hershel. Mica. Lizzie._

That night, neither of them speak. They just stare into the fire’s flames.

…

Soon they must run, again. The herd is not as far away as Daryl had thought, and he wakes in the night with his knife in his hand and a terse yell exiting his throat at Beth to _move_.

But Beth is trapped underneath one of them, her sounds of fear and exertion mingling into the night air. Daryl falls on the walker with a terse yell, wresting it from the girl with a quick stab. He is on his back on the ground next to her, the dead walker on top of him, when another collapses into the dirt to cover him. They’re heavy, he thinks as he struggles to breathe—and Beth does her best to scramble onto her feet, to help him, but she must fend off the one closest to her first.

Daryl does not want to look at the walker’s face. It is a man, and its medium-length hair is dark. He can smell its fetid breath against his cheek, and he has its neck in his grip like he could simply choke the undead life from it. He knows he must look at its face in order to stab his knife into its temple, its brainstem, but, what if it is Rick?

He stabs blindly, stupidly, because he must. It falls from him and he manages to push it off, to stand. It isn’t Rick. And neither is the one that he saves Beth from, now.

The forest is midnight blue and inky, even under the bright moon, and they hold hands to not get separated from one another as they run from the herd. They come across a car not two minutes in front of the walkers, and Daryl motions for Beth to clamber into the trunk. He follows her, pulls the lid down once flat on his back, quickly wraps his bandana around the locking mechanism to ensure that it does not spring up.

A steady rain starts, pelting against their metallic shelter, then a thunderstorm—the howling of the walkers is almost drowned out by biblical booms, but he still does not lower his bow from the small slit afforded by the trunk lifting from its seams. He does not stop looking, does not stop aiming, does not untense the musculature of his arms for the whole night. Beth’s body is warm and trembling against his legs and he cannot do anything to unfurl his own survival instinct. They had had too many close calls for the adrenaline to not set him on fire, keep him alight, just as the lightning which illuminates the small crack in their coffin-shaped shelter does.

He doubts Beth rests, either.

Then it is morning, and she is prying from his cold, stiff fingers the cloth he used to ensure their safety. She is shifting and the trunk hinges squeak, as well as the rusted chassis where the suspension is rotting and protesting beneath them. He wants to grab her arm, stop her, still hearing their snarling echoes and seeing their shuffling footsteps casting shadows.

But the trunk lid lifts onto the beautifully clear morning sky, the clear road stretching forward.

…

Beth has a hitch in her step as they follow the familiar trail to camp.

“I can’t believe we’re going back.”

Daryl catches her murmur above the crunch of fallen leaves, words meant mostly for herself. She is dragging her feet behind him, carrying a plastic bag of detritus from around the sedan, not looking up enough to be aware of their surroundings. He falls back, pushes his elbow into her side, gives her a hard look.

“Pay attention.”

She does not have the strength to fight back. Her lips are chapped and the skin is ripping from them, rough. She is dehydrated, hungry, tired. The sun is relentless in its heat, its bright light, even in the green shadow of the forest canopy.

They follow the road for a long while, and it feels good to have asphalt under their feet as opposed to the uneven forest. But in silent moments, when the breeze blows across the surface of the earth, Daryl is unable to hide from himself. He is at the mercy of his mind, and the thought raises like smoke to the front of his brain: that the name _Rick_ belongs on that list.

They get back to the camp somehow. Daryl makes sure Beth is safe, and she just nods to him as he moves off to hunt for their lunch, waiting for something good to cross his path. It takes a long time—longer than he has waited for food in a while, now. He thinks he may be able to catch something farther away from their camp, but does not want to be out of earshot of Beth in case she screams.

Then he spots it, or, more accurately, hears it. An adult diamondback, all brown and black and pulling itself on its belly across the earth and leaves. It is fat, and so full of good meat that his mouth waters at the thought of his teeth sinking into it.

The odds are that the snake will bite him as opposed to him being able to catch it. But in a feat to beat all feats, he manages to cleave its head off in one swift motion of his blade. Its venom dribbles uselessly out of its fangs as he wrests the skull from the spine with a slick crunching noise, something like triumphant as he makes his way back to camp.

Beth has strung the walker fence in his absence, and she is less than enthusiastic at the sight of him shucking the snake of its rubbery skin. They roast it over a fire, anyway. He picks and digs into its cooked and burnt flesh, irrelevant of cartilage and char, just wishing to have as much as he can fill into this pit in his stomach.

“I want a drink,” Beth ventures, her scraps thrown into the fire, which is promptly extinguished. Daryl tosses her some boiled water from something they’d found leftover from the storm, but she does not look pleased, and does not open the lid of the bottle.

“No—I mean, a real drink.” She looks at him, but he just continues to sink his canines into his quarry. “As in, alcohol.”

Daryl swallows. He is aware of Beth’s surliness, her disapproval at his silence, but he cannot bring himself to care. The food is all that matters. This is the stark difference in needs between a seventeen-year-old body, and one that is just on the other side of forty. 

“Okay,” she sighs. “Enjoy your snake jerky, I guess.”

She moves off. Daryl takes a moment to lick from each of his fingertips the oil of the meat. It has been a long time since Carol’s weird-looking casseroles and the way she tried to wrest him full of every vegetable while she could, undetected, as if he did not know of those Herculean efforts.

But he should not think of Carol, not now. Not that he is alone with a snake carcass and in need of following a surly teen. But the memory of Tyreese telling them about Karen and David, his eyes gone wild and somewhere else in his grief, comes back unbidden. So do Carol’s yells in the side yard and Daryl’s fear at the thing, something, that takes over Rick’s limbs as he smashes his fists into Tyreese’s face over and over.

Daryl sensed Rick had begun to trade his fear for anger—knew this was how he had learned to overcome his own, replacing any sort of weakness with a scar tissue, tough. Ready always for the fight: calculating, cold, and spurring him on. Quick to choose violence over any other road.

Daryl thinks about how Carol had cried when he had to lift Rick bodily off of Tyreese, and how she wouldn’t let Daryl touch her, comfort her afterward.

“It wasn’t supposed to be that way,” she had howled at him, ripping her arm away from his second attempt to reach out. “We’re not supposed to be at each other’s throats like this.” Her blue eyes all water, tears streaming down her pale cheeks.

He knows, now, that he wouldn’t have been able to do what she did—and sometimes that’s the way it has to be. Hindsight making a fool of them all, always.

Best not to think about that, something tells him. Best to not let that weakness in, not now. Not the weakness of not getting to say goodbye to her, nor his anger at Rick raising uselessly in his ribcage because the man had banished her. A unilateral decision, the kind he had thought Rick was done making. Even though he understood Rick’s reasoning, he never accepted it, never put it to rest in him. Carol left, and he should have been there. She did not even fight Rick, the man whose body lays, wasted, in the prison field, walker fodder. The body he had lov—

Daryl picks himself up abruptly. It wasn’t that. It wasn’t.

Beth is easy enough to follow. Daryl ensures her safety against all reason, ensures that the momentarily piqued interest of the walker after her does not cause her flesh to be masticated from her face. She turns when he purposefully cracks a twig, and the fear in her expression falls.

“Come on,” he tells her wearily, once the other walkers have passed. “Back.”

But she does not move despite how relieved she is to see him. “No.”

“It ain’t a negotiation,” he barks.

“But it is,” she shoots back, clinging closer to the tree behind her like it will stop him from dragging her away. She grips to it tightly, her elbows cocked out like a bird readying itself for flight. “I’m not goin’ back to that suck-ass camp, Daryl. I’m gettin’ a drink.”

Daryl runs a hand over his face, turning to shoot a wary gaze around the forest. “Fine,” he agrees. “Follow me.”

He walks a ways along a new path, and Beth seems brighter. She is careful and alert as they pick their way through the underbrush and weave through the boughs. He even finds few beechnuts, stooping for a moment to collect them into his pockets and pass some off to Beth.

He is leading her back, though she does not know. She is unable to keep track of the purposefully meandering path he cuts through this unknown portion of Georgia wildland.

“I guess I shouldn’t have been so quick to think I could handle all that by myself,” she is telling him as they move through a clearing and he motions her along. “But I’m glad you’re agreein’ to help me, now,” she continues. “I think we’ve made it a way, should be close to where we can get boo—”

Daryl sets his jaw as she speaks like she has a handle on things, knows what is going on, and steps gracefully over the walker fence of their camp. She tangles her thighs against it, sending the hubcaps clanging.

“You brought me back?” she yells, her eyes bright with her fury. Daryl can remember how it was being that age, being lied to, and not being able to do anything about it. But she will die from this dumb desire to go get lit. That’s not what they should be doing—that’s not going to help them survive in any way. And he doesn’t know how to convince her of this fact.

When she tells him to fuck off, he grabs her wrist. A warning.

“Hey!” he yells. Then, gentler, “You had your fun.”

She rounds on him, her face full of incomprehension. “What the hell is wrong with you?” she asks him, meaning it. The muscles of her wrist jump against his fingers, and she pulls back but he holds tight. There is pain among the anger when she continues, “Do you even feel anythin’?”

Daryl sets his jaw but doesn’t say a word. Her eyes dart from his left eye to his right, searching his face.

“Yeah, you think everything’s screwed. I guess that’s a feeling,” she assents flippantly, eyes flicking to his bow. “So, what’s the master plan then? Sit here eatin’ mud snakes until we get bit, either by a viper or a walker, or die from exposure? Sit and rot against a log, not sayin’ nothin’ worth anythin’ to each other for years and years?”

Her tone is desperate. She has already lived out this scenario in her head, Daryl can tell. She has already been through it a hundred times and has decided it will not be her reality.

He lets her go, and she staggers backward. “I’m gettin’ a goddamn drink,” she mutters. Then she leaves.

Daryl looks back at the meager camp with its shitty, tattered sun shield and the inside-out skin of the snake still laid out against the fallen trunk. They will need more food and water soon, and anywhere with alcohol may have those two things. So, once again, he follows her.

The snake is settling into his stomach, making his limbs more steady as they move through the forest. From time to time Beth’s fine features turn back and regard him from a distance, lit as they are by light pouring through leaves. She looks angry sometimes, and other times, concerned. She looks like she might want to say something to him had they not spent a lot of time together butting heads—looks like the little sister or niece he’d never had.

Daryl withdraws within himself to escape this. He does not want conversation, or another chance to say the wrong thing, to argue with the teen. But inside his head is not without its own tension, either. Each crack of a twig brings to mind the artillery impact against the walls of the prison, each walker’s dry howling an echo of a scream.

He makes a particularly messy kill and cold, stinking blood covers his arm. As he rubs some leaves over it and sees his own fingers, they are suddenly someone else’s—slim, pressing into a thigh in the pivotal moment of war so unexpected.

What if Rick’s femoral artery was nicked? His jeans black, making it hard to gauge the amount of blood pouring from between his hands from such a distance. What if the bullet was lodged in his muscle and he was now septic? Or if it had shattered the bone, rendering him immobile?

What if he just bled out in a matter of minutes, alone, as Daryl ran?

“Golfers like to booze it up, right?”

Daryl lifts his eyes to Beth’s face, focusing on her features. She has loose hairs framing her face, and they blow in the slight breeze that crosses the fairway. Daryl realizes they are on an overgrown golf course—a golf cart upturned nearby, some red flags marking holes, and a group of six or seven walkers in the distance. He looks around, weighing out the chances that they would be able to take the group on. It is a longshot.

Then he sees it, at the end of the fairway. There is a white building, reminiscent of a mausoleum with its Roman columns and high, triangular roof. This must be an omen, he tells himself. The crows, the car trunk, the mausoleum—how many more harbingers of death will they meet until they meet their own?

He sidles a club through door handles once they slip inside, effectively barring them. The smell is not strong, more of a dusty decay lingering, and so Daryl guesses these corpses have been gone for maybe a year; the whole place gone to rot long ago.

He watches Beth’s face carefully as they make their way around the rooms, illuminating them with two found flashlights. She is ardently searching for a bottle of anything, her eyes feverish and catching scant light in the dimness. But the whole place is a pit, and it is hard to find anything past the detritus.

Not that Daryl’s a shining example of cleanliness himself, but this club reminds him of some parties he and Merle had been to at trap houses deep in some backwoods holler. There, he would invariably wake up on some torn up couch with exposed springs, next to junkies and their sweet-smelling meth smoke. Here, Daryl wonders how many lines of Columbian white had been chopped against the metallic kitchen counters while the residents were still alive. _Same thing_ , he thinks. _All the same fucking thing_.

A huge pile of trash bags lurks in a filthy corner of the kitchen, and there is not much besides scraps and waste. Daryl manages to find some cinnamon sticks in a small spice container, one of which he slips into his mouth as they move deeper into the building. They must be on the other side already, in a store that has a little light coming in through parts of the windows where the newspaper covering has fallen off. He takes a bowl full of matchbooks and slips them into his pocket, chewing on the cinnamon stick as he pokes around at the other things there.

When he finds half of what used to be a woman on top of a mannequin bottom, he knows what has happened in this place. In the beginning, hope lost and living in excess, the people who sheltered here drank toasts to the end of the world. Then, as unprotected as it was from others, it was raided by an outside group.

These people were killed during a pillage.

 _RICH BITCH_ , the sign reads in letters of blood, stuck into the walker-mannequin’s chest by an ornate martini skewer. Her eyes were plucked out. Daryl knows what else was probably done to her.

At Beth’s behest, he covers this corpse with a sheet.

…

The tall window above the bar, letting light in at the end of the long hall, almost looks like a walkway into a church. The bar a preacher’s pulpit, the knocked over tables where the congregation would sit and imbibe the holy word.

Beth is turning to him before they enter the strangely sacred space, her voice already hard.

“I know you think this is stupid, and I don’t care,” she starts. “All I wanted to do today was lay down and cry, but we don’t get to do that. We don’t.”

Daryl does not argue.

“So—I need to do this.”

Daryl does not know what to say, watching her back retreat from him as she moves steadily toward this destiny. He remembers Rick telling him about Hershel one of those mornings in bed, for the few minutes they had before Rick worked all day out into the field. Rick and Glenn gone after the farmer back on the Farm, talking about a train to Nebraska in a bar with some dangerous men while Hershel swayed on his bar stool.

“I’d never seen him like that,” Rick had murmured, staring up into the wire springs of the bottom of the top bunk above them, where he kept his clothing. He was warm in Daryl’s arms, his voice a syrup in his ears. Daryl had tucked his nose closer to the man’s jaw in the face of this soft sentiment, had kissed the skin of his neck with a reverence designated for only the holy.

Beth sits at the bar a long time with a found bottle while Daryl throws dart after dart into the fleshy white faces of the men who once were presidents of the club. He realizes, eventually, that she is crying after all. She is crying because if she does this then there will be nothing else to do, nothing else to lock on to, no other journey to sustain her and push her onward. She holds the bottle with white knuckles but cannot bring herself to do it.

At this realization, the angry thing in Daryl shifts to the side, making a little room for something soft to lull him into movement.

He takes the bottle from her fingers and smashes it in one graceful arc of his arm swinging down against the floor. “Ain’t gonna let your first drink be no damned peach schnapps,” he tells her, shoving open an exit. “C’mon. I know a place.”

Out in the bright light of day, a single walker ambles it way over at the sound of the door opening. Daryl readies his bow to loose a bolt through it, but Beth is rushing past him to sink her knife deep into its skull. She grunts with the effort of it but manages to keep herself on her feet.

She throws a look over her shoulder, and Daryl studies her intense expression, the strong lines of her shoulders and the bloodied blade in her fist. She wipes the wetness from her cheeks with a resolute gesture, the back of her hand leaving a line of dirt.

Later, in the forest, she asks, “You’re not just leadin’ me back to camp, are you?”

Daryl holds a tree branch back for her, allows her to pass. “No,” he says. “We’re never goin’ back there.”

…

The moonshine shack is next to a cabin with a front-facing breezeway, porch covered in dilapidated netting to keep out the bugs. Its dark wood stretches horizontally but not vertically, the lintel of the door quite low. No one chooses to spend time in a place like this unless it is necessary. Daryl cannot decide if he proves this rule or is an exception to it.

Daryl’s first night in this cabin, Michonne had lit a candle—something called vanilla spice—to keep his cigarette smell at bay. “I can’t stand that,” she told him, her nose wrinkling, and Daryl just made a face at her, moving to light up another as the blue smoke filtered out. She had lined candles all along the single wide window’s sill, the white wax dripping down the side of the wall. It was peaceful, and they watched the sun set as they picked at cans of beans and cold chili.

“You know what this place is, ri’?” he had asked her, inhaling against the filter of his sixth cigarette. She shook her head, looking up from a small paperback she had found. Some pulp story from the eighties.

“A hillbilly distillery,” he told her with a wry smile. It was a phrase that she laughed at.

“No.”

“Yeah,” Daryl countered, smirking. “They probably got enough booze out there to take down a whole army of elephants.”

“What’re you waitin’ for, then?” she asked him, her eyes shining. “Let’s toast to another successful run.”

He turns to Beth, now, watching her face take in the building.

“I found this place with Michonne,” he tells her, leaving out the part where they had had to sprint for their lives during the middle of the night, when a herd had broken in through the window.

“I was expecting a liquor store.”

“This is better,” he says with something like a smile.

He lifts an old peach crate full of the stuff, probably forty pounds of it in various glass bottles, in her arms and they walk into the cabin through its side door. He makes a quick sweep, but the space is small, so the action only takes a few seconds. The ashtray on the table is right where he left it, the yellow chair he sat on that night still in the same position.

It is where Beth sits now as he pours her a dram. “That’s a real first drink right there,” he tells her, almost proud.

Her face wrinkles, and she laughs under his watchful eye as she sips. She quickly drains the glass and reaches for the container, at which Daryl tells her to slow down.

“This one’s for you,” she says, her eyes wide and looking up at him. He shakes his head. She seems disappointed.

“Why?”

He shrugs. “Someone’s gotta keep watch.”

“So, what, you’re like my chaperone now?”

Daryl puts space between them at the sound of anger rising in her voice again. “Just drink lots’a water,” he tells her as he moves around the table and out to the side door.

“Yes, Mr. Dixon,” she mutters after him.

He is still trying to ascertain what kind of drunk Beth is when she offers him the jar of moonshine. “If we’re stayin’ here, might as well make the best of it,” she says, and Daryl reluctantly agrees. He sinks his spine into the armchair, next to her blanket nest, unscrewing the top of the mason jar and taking a sip.

“Home, sweet home,” he says, fishing out a butt from the brassier.

…

He is thinking they may be able to turn this place into somewhere that could last them the autumn, the winter—the next spring—when Beth starts explaining a drinking game her friends had once played. She motions for him to move down and join her on the floor, using a trashed coffee table to hold a candle and their drinks between them.

“I ain’t never needed a game to get lit before.”

She laughs, then abruptly stops. “Wait, are we startin’?”

He squints at her. “Yeah. Shoot.”

“Okay,” Beth starts, face breaking into a wide smile as she thinks. “Okay,” she repeats, “I’ve never slept with a girl.”

Daryl furrows his brow and picks up the jar, swallowing a scant mouthful. Beth looks at him, triumphant, and he snorts derisively. “Didn’t like it, so don’t look so pleased.”

“But you still did it,” she counters. “Which means I won that round.” She juts her chin at him, grinning. “Your turn.”

“Fine. I never—been to prom,” he says. Beth’s face draws in on itself, and she does not drink.

“Shit,” he says.

“Whatever,” Beth replies. A moment passes, and she is suddenly bright again as she thinks about her next phrase. “I’ve never been in love.”

Daryl instinctively raises the jar to his mouth, but it only makes it halfway there. He regards Beth’s expectant expression over the lip of it, then sets it back down against the dumpster table. Beth’s eyebrow raises.

“You lyin’, Daryl Dixon?” she asks.

Daryl ignores her. “I never been out of Georgia,” he says. “Well, except Tallahassee.”

“Then that doesn’t count!” Beth smiles, self-righteous at catching him. “You lie and you have to drink the whole thing.”

“You didn’t explain that rule,” Daryl protests. But Beth is insistent.

“Doesn’t matter. You gotta.”

Daryl sneers, raising the mason jar to his lips in a flourished ministration with his once-broken pinky sticking out as it usually does, nowadays. He swallows the contents whole, reaching for another bottle.

“Should make you finish that one, too, for lyin’ twice.”

Daryl squints at her again but says nothing, and does not drink.

Beth continues, “I never been drunk and did somethin’ I regretted.”

Daryl studies her with a fingernail running against his lips. He lifts the new jar to his mouth.

“Done a lot’a things,” he mutters after swallowing a mouthful, not looking at her. He clears his throat. “Never wrote in no diary, though,” he says.

“Cheap shot,” Beth says, downing her last dram. She reaches over to his jar and pours out some more for herself, handing the receptacle back quickly. “Fine. I never been in jail,” she tells him with a grin. “At least, not as a prisoner.”

Daryl stares at her for a long time, so long that she starts to squirm.

“I didn’t mean nothin’ by it.”

“But that’s what you think of me.” It isn’t even a question.

“No,” Beth backtracks. “Not even as a guard, or nothin’? Zach never guessed that one.”

Daryl motions at her, his fury cold. “Drink up.”

“Really?” she says, and Daryl can tell she wants to shove the word back in her mouth as soon as it is out. But, yes, this is what she thinks of him—and yes, she also wishes she did not. Knows better, now.

Not soon enough.

“Your turn,” she tries, but Daryl cannot stand by. He lifts himself from the floor, supporting his weight the coffee table as everything reels slightly to the side. He stumbles drunkenly, bringing himself to a far corner of the cabin. Beth thinks she was scandalized by a gun going off in the house; when his dad would shoot at the stupid, kitschy, pink brassier ashtray? Wait until she sees this, he thinks. He pisses in a corner, not even bothering to go outside. Just like the untamable animal he purports to be.

“But, wait, it’s my turn—ri’?” he demands, stepping away from the now-sodden corner of low-quality carpet as he zips up his fly. “Wait—Never had to rely on no one for protection, before,” he bites, and Beth’s face goes pale. She will not look at him, so he punches the yellow chair where he sat so many weeks ago to get her attention. He catches the vanilla scent of Michonne’s candle, and this is when he knows he is not yelling at Beth. He is yelling at a version of himself that let hope in, that let someone in, only to lose it all.

“Daryl,” Beth warns, weakly. “The walkers.”

Without Beth, Daryl has nothing. That is why he pushes her away, cannot stop pushing her away despite understanding her mistakes. Cannot stop punishing her even though he is the adult. In a lot of ways, he still feels like a kid trapped in a cabin, listening as the gunshots speed up in intervals against the cheap ceramic bustier. He is still that scared kid waiting, distantly, for the day when the belt buckle is substituted for the six-shooter as his dad gets drunker and drunker and the night gets darker and darker and it is only them, just them, in the middle of the wide woods.

“Hey,” he calls to her. “You ever shot a crossbow before?” He drags her up by her upper arm, pulling her toward the door. “I’ll teach you. It’ll be fun, so much fuckin’ fun.”

“Let’s practice later,” she begs as he drags her outside, and the walker whips around to face them. He holds her hostage against his chest, the bow brandished in front of them as she struggles.

“No way,” Daryl counters, firing a bolt. It is sloppy, but it locks the walker to the tree trunk behind it, and he lets Beth go to pull the counterweight back, reload. “Killin’ walkers the only fun we got left.”

“Just stop it!”

But he doesn’t. He pulls her to his chest again like his dad, lit as a candle and shoving his version of strength down his throat. Beating it into him, punishing him for every misstep until he makes them all perfect. Until he can hook a fish and debone it, until he can pull back the weight of the crossbow to reload, until he stops looking at boys and starts chasing skirts instead. Daryl cannot shove these memories out of his addled mind, gripping Beth’s shoulders close as he lines up another shot.

“Just kill it,” Beth begs, her breath ragged against him. He laughs, the acidic sound reeling off into the empty air around the cabin.

“You’re being a jackass,” Beth howls, breaking free. She runs forward to sink her blade into the walker’s skull. It ceases its movements against the tree trunk, and Daryl rounds on her, fuming.

“Thought handlin’ walkers was all you liked me for,” he bites. “So what d’you want from me, girl? Huh?”

Beth digs her heels into the dirt, tears threatening her eyes. “I want my friend back,” Beth gasps. “You’re my only friend in the whole world, now, Daryl.”

Daryl is backed into a corner by these words. He staggers from the drink and pain paints itself in swathes across his face.

“I want you to stop actin’ like you don’t give a crap about anythin’,” she yells at him. “Like nothin’ we went through matters.”

“You don’t know nothin’ about that,” Daryl mutters, almost slurring. But she does—she does. She knows that this is all because he has some words buried in his chest that he never unearthed.

What does he do, with all this love? He lets it curdle and warp into rage.

Beth forces past his walls. “You don’t understand me, ‘cause I’m not like you. ‘Cause I still have feelings, still mourn. Still care.”

She gets right up in his face, all five feet and four inches of her, all one hundred and fifteen pounds of her. He admires her bravery at the same time the self-insulating anger in him flares, dangerous.

“But I made it—and you don’t get to treat me like crap just because you’re scared.”

Daryl’s voice is venom. “I ain’t scared of nothin’.”

“I remember,” Beth bites back. “That morning, and you and Rick, and he was asleep with you there up against him like—like—” She does not know how to phrase it, not for phobia but for a lack of language, of experience. “Like you were in love,” she finally spits.

Daryl’s grip on his crossbow tightens and he wishes there were another walker, another thing there he can pour this rage, this monstrous and soured emotion out onto. Something he can kill instead of having whatever this is inside him slowly kill him, claw away at him, from the inside out.

“Judith’s father—Rick—you loved him, and now he’s gone. I’ve loved people that are gone, now, too, Daryl,” she assents, her knees bending at the weight of having to carry this alone.

He is forcing her to carry it alone.

“You were like me once,” she tells him, and Daryl feels his mouth begin to tremble. “I know you were! Now God forbid you ever let anyone get too close. ‘Cause then you’d have to feel somethin’. Then you’d have to check in with yourself,” she bites, her eyes hard against welling tears. “You’d have to admit you’re alone.”

This is when his voice begins to crack. He cannot face Beth any longer—they are both breaking down.

“Maybe if I wouldn’t have stopped lookin’ for the Governor,” he says, a sob threatening to take the words entire. “Then we’d all still be there, we’d all still—But I gave up.”

Beth tries to wrap her arms around him, but he resists. He throws her off.

“Daryl—”

“No,” he wails. He cannot stand her touch, cannot stand even his own body. “I didn’t do anythin’, so—” He cannot say it. “If I had just—Maybe if I could’ve—Saved them—”

_Zach. Caleb. Hershel. Mica. Lizzie. Rick._

Then Beth is wrapping her strong, wiry arms around him, pressing herself to his spine. She is trying to cover his pain with her own pain, and the bittersweet beauty of this movement only brings more tears to his eyes. He chokes. He doesn’t deserve it, he thinks. How could he ever deserve it?

Of course it was all taken away.

The late afternoon light is like glass in his eyes, but he cannot look away from the sun. He breaks down, wrapped up like this in Beth’s arms, her honest cheek against his shoulder blade. He cries without reserve, letting everything out with the aid of the moonshine felling his internal walls. He is disgusted by himself at the same time he is appreciative of Beth—But, ultimately, he is in love with a dead man. A dead man who never knew.

And that will not change, no matter how many tears he sheds.

….

They lean on the porch after dusk, Beth sustaining herself with a liquid dinner. Daryl looks out into the night, the alcohol run ragged through his system to leave his limbs heavy.

“You wanna know what I was before all this?” he asks her softly, recalling Zach. As if the boy were just off in the distance, somewhere, or had been sitting there with them the whole night. Just like Michonne and her candle, Carol and her casserole, Hershel with his notebook, Dr. S and his mudras. Rick—just, Rick.

“I was nobody,” Daryl tells her flatly. “Nothing.”

Beth’s eyes regard him for a long time. “You know I’ll be gone someday, right?” she says thoughtfully.

“Stop,” he says, whittling away at the rotting ledge beneath them with his hunting knife—a nervous tick.

“I will. Be gone.” Then she sways against the support beam she is leaned against. “And you’re gonna be the last man standing,” she says, a knowing wryness in her voice, like it is the best compliment she can think of giving. In truth, Daryl can think of no worse fate. Not dying, not even turning. But still being here, still dragging himself forward through it all, pointlessly. Alone in the wasteland of civilization, the infiniteness of nothing, day in and day out.

But she is just a kid. A drunk kid, learning and trying to understand him. So, he closes his mouth, just stares at her and hears the cicadas going off like white noise all around them.

“You gotta stay who you are,” Beth continues. “So, if Rick’s really dead—”

Daryl starts to shake his head. He thought he had cried it all out hours ago, the evening sun blinding his drunk eyes, but he starts shaking his head and he cannot stop. Neither does Beth.

“If he’s really dead,” she repeats, “but you can’t feel him dead in you, then you gotta find a way to put it away.”

His voice is thick, and his tongue feels foreign in his mouth. “What if I can’t?”

“You just have to.” Her jaw is set and her eyes are wide. “Bury it. Bury him. Or it _kills_ you.”

He braces himself, pushing back into the beam against his spine. He glares.

She laughs at this show of pain, eyes darting from his blade to his eyes, again. If she is still scared of him, she does not show any signs of being so. “Here,” she murmurs, touching her heart just past her thin thread necklace with its small silver charm and spare button. “It kills whatever’s left of you, right here.”

Daryl is suddenly reminded of a character from a book his mom read sometimes when he was a kid, before she died—a little blonde girl in a land where all her words came out backwards, and everyone else seemed born upside-down, and comedy and tragedy both were circus mirror distorted. She said things normal, but no one understood. She was so alone while the world laughed around her, that eventually, she stopped crying. Instead, she started laughing, too.

…

They burn the cabin down, all smashed glass and poured moonshine smelling almost like gasoline. They burn it down and Beth’s face is bright in the red-orange flames and smiling—free.

Daryl realizes that she knows the pain of strength, of too much strength turning into a weakness, warping the body entire. He watches her and hopes somehow, hopes against hope, he will be able to protect her long enough so she can be there with him in the dying light: His friend.

The blaze of the fire consumes the edges of the blue-black forest, illuminating the dark.


	2. Blind Hope

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Does hope cease to exist at the advent of sight? Covers events of S04E13.

As dawn rises during his watch, Daryl notices Beth shivering in her sleep. The night has imbued the morning with a chill, something fog-wet and permeating. Even he isn’t immune to it.

Beth stirs slightly, the sound of her teeth chattering waking her. She rubs the side of her hand across her eyes, bringing herself from the dirt.

“Why didn’t you wake me up?” she asks, fugue thick in her throat. “You let me sleep through my shift.”

“S’fine,” Daryl replies, clearing his throat. “Hey, let’s try to find some jackets or somethin’ today. It’s only gonna get colder.”

Beth hums in agreement, and as she gathers her wits about her Daryl keeps a steady eye on the surrounding forest. The things she had told him at the cabin still weigh heavy in his chest. He felt that if he had slept with them there, they may have suffocated him with their weight. Easier to stay awake. Easier to do this until dawn could chase the shadows away, and tiredness numb the mind.

It is not long before they come upon a small ranch style house, almost overgrown with kudzu vines. Daryl would have walked right past it had it not been for the slow rattling of a loose shutter being blown by the wind. It set him on high alert, sounding almost exactly like the labored breathing of a walker.

Beth helps him pull the scant vines off the door, and he lets loose a shout to draw forth from inside whatever may be hiding. They wait, and eventually a single walker does come ambling out. Its long, grey, molting hair is obscured by a trucker hat. Daryl finishes it quickly with a bolt to the brain.

They walk warily in, and Daryl bends to retrieve his arrow. Beth has paused in the dim hall, her eyes on the reflective glass of a picture. Daryl comes to join her, wiping the arrowhead against his shin. It is a portrait of an older man with his young daughter. They are clearly not wealthy, but seem happy just to have one another. Daryl looks out of the corner of his eye at Beth’s expression, then moves to rid the walker corpse of its black denim jacket.

The elbow of the garment is torn, but it is not as full of rot as Daryl had suspected. In fact, it is surprisingly clean. He throws it over Beth’s narrow shoulders as they move further into the house, eventually coming upon a quaint bedroom. It has nothing of interest immediately in sight, except for a bedside lamp with a clay base depicting a carousel horse. The paint over it was once bright but is now chipped and covered in dust.

Daryl provides cover under the door lintel while Beth opens drawers in a nearby dresser, digging through. She pulls from one a grey sweater, moth-eaten, but sufficient. She tosses the black denim jacket back to Daryl as she pulls it on, one arm then the other. Daryl takes a moment to remove his vest, pull the jacket on as well.

The don’t talk about the father and daughter. They just move on once they find the kitchen cupboards empty.

…

It is near noon when Daryl hands his crossbow to Beth, and tells her to start tracking. They had already suppressed their appetites with some found pecans and bitter, edible roots, and Daryl keeps an eye out for walkers and animals alike as they stalk through the forest.

“We’re not even on anything’s trail,” Beth says, exasperated. “You’re just tryin’ to pull one on me.”

“Am not,” Daryl shoots back. “C’mon, you were the one who wanted to learn. What are we followin’?”

Beth bends closer to the ground, inspecting the tracks. “They’re uneven,” she says. “Shufflin’. A walker?”

Daryl shrugs as she looks to him for confirmation. “Could just be a drunk.”

Beth shakes her head. “Nope, it’s a walker. I’m sure of it.”

They follow its meandering path into a clearing, at which Beth takes an elated breath in as her guess is proved correct. “It’s got a gun!” she whispers excitedly, hoisting Daryl’s crossbow to her shoulder, not without some effort.

But the shot is too long for a beginner like her, so she moves forward as Daryl keeps a protective distance.

Then there is the sharp clang of a trap arresting her foot, and Beth falls down as the arrow shoots uselessly into the air. Beth is crying out in pain as Daryl rushes forward to take the crossbow from her, using the butt of it to throw himself bodily into the oncoming threat. He bashes its skull in bluntly, ensuring it is dead, before hurriedly clambering to pull the guarded trap off of Beth’s foot. He takes her boot in his two hands, gingerly attempting to rotate the ankle.

“Can you move it?”

She grits her teeth and nods. “Fuck, that hurt.”

Daryl looks around at the clearing, making sure the walker did not have a posse with it. He lets Beth try to remove her boot on her own, instead taking the gun belt off the dead walker and moving back to her side with it.

He pulls the slide of the handgun back, revealing a bullet in the chamber, then releases the clip. It has two bullets there, so three total. He fishes around in the ammo pockets and comes out with only lint.

“No good?” Beth asks him, grimacing, her sock-covered foot exposed to the air. She starts to roll this down, too, and Daryl shakes his head.

“Better than nothin’.”

He takes a moment to assess the damage to her limb and finds nothing obviously broken. It has already started to swell, though, and the ordeal of drawing her sock and boot on once more are clearly not worth the effort of taking them off in the first place.

As she moves to stand, Daryl bends close to wrap the gun belt around her waist. He clips the buckle into place, then moves his thumb against the small metal shield pinned to its surface.

“New sheriff in town,” he says distractedly. She looks down at this and smiles, but it soon turns to a frown as Daryl does not meet her eyes, locked onto the medal.

“I was thinkin’ about Carl,” she tells him, her voice soft and suggesting commiseration. Daryl nods shallowly, then drops his hand. They start to walk.

Ten minutes pass before Daryl can see the visceral pain that crosses Beth’s face. He had offered to carry her but she refused, managing to hop along in her own way to cushion her ankle from too much impact.

No matter how many times he was told growing up to _walk it off,_ Daryl knows this is not the way to treat an injury. Especially one as debilitating as a sprained ankle. Luckily, Beth soon asks for him to pause so she can sit.

They push through the last few feet at the edge of the forest, and find themselves in front of a cemetery. Beth holds on to him for stability as he gazes around the area, each stone obelisk weatherworn and eroded. He can tell that the graves of the long-dead far outnumber the graves of the recently deceased.

 _Great_ , Daryl thinks. _After it all, the crows and the car trunk and the mausoleum, an actual mortuary_. The proverbial final nail in the coffin.

At this thought, Daryl positions himself in front of Beth and bends at his haunches. “Hop up.”

“You serious?” Beth laughs.

“Yeah, this is a serious piggyback. Jump on.”

She reluctantly clambers on. He hoists her up with a grunt, and they continue toward the house in the distance despite everything in him telling him to run.

He feels Beth slip from his back as they cross a tombstone. _Beloved Father_ , its inscription reads. Her face has gone thoughtful and Daryl knows she is far away. He takes some ragwort from a nearby monumental slab, places the cluster of bright yellow flowers reverently on top of the headstone. Beth seems to like this—the yellow, the gesture—and she slips her hand into his and squeezes.

“Y’know, your dad,” Daryl starts, “he had that way of bein’ with people that was real nice. He was funny, too, surprisingly. Like him and his fountain pen at the Council meetings…”

Beth leans her temple against his shoulder, listening to the sound of his voice.

“He taught me about history. Not just history, but ours. How important it is that we’re here, alive, and still us.” Daryl looks down at her, the crown of blonde hair framing her forehead. “I know I never said nothin’ to you, but—he was a great man. You should be proud.”

She says nothing except to squeeze his hand again. They wait there for a few minutes that way, and Daryl stands in silence with her, guarding her.

Then she slips her hand from his and moves to jump back up onto his shoulders. He sets her down again on the porch of the mortuary, poking carefully around. The windows on the lower levels are all boarded shut, as well as every door except for the front. There are no walkers in sight—not even dead ones. It seems they avoid the final resting place even figuratively.

He knocks loudly on the doorjamb once inside, whistles, waits for them to come pouring out. But instinct tells him that this will not happen—it won’t be walkers that come out, at least. The place is too clean, too organized. It has not once been looted, overrun, or left to rot. If it is someone—or more than one—Daryl thinks they’re pretty smart: Who would want to come to a funeral home when every day out there is so touched by death?

They move in, Beth limping, as the sun begins to set. He finds the stairs leading to the basement, but does not expect to find what they do in the body preparation room.

It is medical, sanitized within an inch of its life. Daryl feels ten times dirtier just being among the gleaming white tiles. But even more so when he realizes the things there on two polished metal tables aren’t people, but walkers. Walkers covered in makeup and smelling distinctly of formaldehyde, preserving what was rotted and then reanimated by whatever virus they all carry within their bodies. There are shining silver instruments out on wheeled tables, blue nitrile gloves in several places around the small space. Daryl begins digging through the cabinets, trying to suppress a creeping sensation that carries itself over his skin.

“Let’s get that ankle wrapped up,” he tells Beth. He hopes she will be able to heal, soon, be able to run, if they need to.

But she is distracted by the bodies on the embalming tables. She stares at the one closest to them, and Daryl tries futilely to convey his dread.

“Looks like someone ran out of dolls to dress up,” he mutters, tearing at some packaging around the supplies with his teeth.

When Beth counters, “It’s beautiful,” in that earnest way of hers, Daryl doesn’t believe it. He feels like he’s inside of some grindhouse movie, and meat hooks will drop from the ceiling at any moment. He cannot fathom the kind of grace that the girl feels, here.

“Someone cared,” Beth continues, explaining when she clocks his confused expression. “Whoever did this wanted these people to get a proper funeral.”

Daryl feels his face fall. Leave it to the kid to bring it up so sweetly, but still remind him of all the people in their life they’ve burned, or had to leave behind—The people they have not been able to bury. Remind him of Carol’s grave sitting empty when he thought she had died, and the mass grave of their flu-ill, and the grave, undug, that Rick will never be interred in.

“They remembered these things were people, before all this. They didn’t let it change them.” She raises her eyes to his and he cannot stop thinking about how he would have dug a grave. If only he could have dug a grave, worn his arms and his back out to the point of breaking, set that man’s body to rest inside of it. How reverently he would have done it, how properly, if he had just been afforded the chance to.

“Don’t you think that’s beautiful?”

He doesn’t answer her. Just moves her along, tends to her injury in silence, trying to push the thought down and away. Another thing on the pile, deep-rooted, inside him.

Once Beth’s ankle is wrapped, they set to looking for food. It’s at the point in the day where Daryl has to decide if he is going hunting and foraging, or if they will have to live with their empty bellies through the night.

In the kitchen they find a stockpile, and Daryl cannot help but laugh at the fare.

“Peanut butter, jelly, diet soda, pig’s feet—that’s a white trash brunch ri’ there.”

Beth just shrugs this comment off, clearly hungry. “It all looks good to me.”

Among the rest is distilled water, cans of okra, and jars of baby food stacked five deep and three high. This gives Daryl pause, and he begins to put back a jar of peanut butter that he holds in his hand.

“Wait,” he tells Beth. “Let’s only take what we need.”

There had been no crib in the either of the bedrooms upstairs, but Daryl knows it is possible the baby does not use one. And if there is a baby, it means there is just one of them here, tending to this place—why else would they go out there with a child, unless they were its only caretaker?

It could just be an adult stockpiling vitamin-rich foods, a part of him says. After all, food is food, even if it is a paste. But he thinks of Judith and grits his teeth. He cannot bring himself to do it. He only brings forth what he’ll eat for the night, as if rationing.

Still, such a find is worth celebrating. He pops the lid off the sugary, colorant-loaded, off-brand grape jelly—not suitable to feed to a baby—and motions toward the shelving.

“Those pigs’ feet are mine,” he calls, scooping some jelly straight from the jar onto his fingers, and sucking it off.

“Whatever, have them,” Beth responds, walking around to the other side of the table to avoid being too close to him. “God, you’re disgustin’ when you eat. Anyone ever tell you that? Thought gay guys were supposed to be all refined and polite and stuff.”

But Daryl just laughs manically, pushing all thoughts out of his mind, making a show of uncouthly bringing more jelly into his mouth.

…

A little while later, Daryl is stringing up the perimeter with a walker fence while Beth settles into the main house. He is keeping an eye out for walkers, but for whoever has left the stash, too. Even though Beth’s claim of the bodies in the mortuary being beautiful obviously soothed her, it did nothing to soothe him. The thought of meeting the person who did this sends a chill through his bones, and he is imagining some hill people psychosis during his efforts of setting a perimeter with the empty cans and other tin metal objects. While it is easier to guard against brain-dead walkers than humans with such traps, knowing that the front door is the only way in makes him feel they are relatively safer as he gets to reenforcing, double-checking the boards set into place over the windows and back entrances.

He wipes his brow with his knuckles, coming to the end of his work. It is just past dusk now, and knowing he does not have to hunt for their dinner later comes as a welcome relief. He is thinking about cracking open the jar of pigs’ feet when he hears the slow notes of a piano from inside, tentative but coming together surely into a melody. He pulls a deflated water bottle out of his back pocket and finishes its contents, waiting for the tones to even out into something even his untrained ear finds coherent, pretty. With one last look at the landscape around, he ducks back into the building through the front door and locks it behind him, quiet, light on his feet.

The song draws him deeper into the funeral home. He can see a flickering glow coming from a doorway down the hall, reflecting light onto the polished wooden boards beneath his feet. Then the sweet sorrow of Beth’s voice reaches his ears, and he finds himself leaning against the wooden jamb of the viewing room, watching her narrow shoulders bent over her work at the piano sitting there across a sea of empty chairs. She has lit some tealights and spread them around the room, obviously working from memory as opposed to the open songbook spread out the music rack.

“It’s unclear now, what we intend,” Beth is murmuring, with her back to the opening of the room. She moves her lithe fingers over the keys with some stilted harmony, and presses her foot on to the pedals at the base of the instrument. Daryl notices she is shielding her twisted ankle against the movement necessary to make the music. “We’re alone in our own world…”

Daryl does not recognize the song. Many of the songs Beth sings are young, and he is too old and was too removed from society to understand much of any of the references that leave her mouth. Still, it is nice, and he finds himself sinking into his place against the jamb, crossing his arms as if in a familiar space—as if against the concrete jamb in the entrance to Rick’s room, back at the prison. Almost all at once Beth’s blonde ponytail and knit sweater are in front of him at the same time Rick is standing somewhere amongst the chairs, bending to blow out a candle while Daryl watches on, watches the man with a fullness growing softly in his chest.

He becomes tender, visible to even himself, aware of what is happening to his heart: Rick’s ghost here, still, despite the burning cabin and all the things it meant to him and Beth. After all, he had not promised to bury it, just let her do what needed to be done for her own good. Felt some satisfaction that he could help her achieve that with his, somehow less meaningful, life.

He feels in many ways he has always been the vehicle, and never the driver. That he was good for a run—even a long run—but not for a lifetime. Never that.

Daryl’s never been one for thoughts of suicide—hanging on like a poorly cut fingernail to whatever stimulus the world provides, too stubborn, too full of bravado. Perhaps that has always been his cover, the thought that _now is a good a day as any_ to die—he knows he has said it more than once. But he sinks uncomfortably, and at the same time, so comfortably, into the thought of dying, here, in the mortuary where signifiers of a peaceful end abound. Thinking this, he feels his face split in half as if it were a mask. Which side is true, and which is make-believe? Both seem unreal to him from where he reposes, listening to Beth’s song.

“You don’t wanna be my boyfriend, and I don’t wanna be your girl,” Beth continues in her own way, meandering beautifully through the tune. Daryl cannot remember the last time he heard a love song, and the thought makes his chest sore. How many songs had been put on at the oft-visited dive bars, before, by the old men drowning in their drinks way past last call? Where he was pulling Merle off some rickety stool when the crooning singer lamented in one way or another someone, some feeling, irrevocably lost to time?

It is all an echo through time affecting him, now, too.

He clears his throat loudly, on purpose, and Beth stops abruptly. She turns to look at him, a small panic in her face at having been so unaware of everything around her for the past few minutes.

“Place is nailed up tight,” Daryl tells her, gruff, and he puts his crossbow down on the satin-lined loveseat to his right. “Only way in is through the front door.”

He hops up into the empty coffin at the head of the all the chairs. It’s a thing of beauty, he thinks, distantly, all shining wood and spotless silk. Even has a little pillow with lace edging.

“What are you doin’?” Beth asks with some nonplussed humor in her voice.

Daryl sighs, a heavy sound that lets the tension out from his limbs. He moves to make himself relaxed in the vessel, eventually laying down. “This is the comfiest bed I’ve had in years,” he tells her.

“Really?”

“I ain’t kiddin’.” He scootches into the plush lining. Then he looks at Beth, who is looking pointedly at the ground. “Why don’t you keep singin’?”

Her eyes flash to his. “Thought my singin’ annoyed you.”

“Yeah, well,” he nods. “Ain’t no jukebox, so.”

A smile flickers across her face, directed at this small kindness of his. He brings his index finger to his mouth as she turns around on the piano bench, picks up the refrain. His eyes run again over her narrow form, the hole in the shoulder of her sweater.

“And we talk on the phone at night, until it’s daylight and I feel clever,” Beth sings. “And I hear the slow in your speech, yeah—you’re half asleep.” The hopeful trill of the piano balances her sweet, sorrowful voice perfectly.

There are no old men, no Merle to try and drag outside while avoiding punches. He isn’t drunk for once and the song fills the air between them, seems to supersede them, here, in the physical world. He turns his face up toward the ceiling, and finds himself thinking more abstractly of before, the pre-change. He wonders, not for the first time, about Rick—about Rick’s life. A working, family man with the weekend off, maybe making nice with the neighbors while the weather is good. He does yard work and has a slice carved out in a community that knows him, respects him.

He pictures Rick on the porch as a younger Carl rides his bike down the lane to a friend’s place. Summer vacation, no school, all of that. He has just mowed the lawn after Lori’s third behest, and the shade of the porch pours over his sweat-slicked, olive skin like a sigh. The garage door is up, and the mower is waiting to be put away in the drive.

Daryl can see it—the house with its fresh-painted siding and new windows. The alarm company sign there by a nicely kept shrub and some flowering hyacinths. Rick smiles as his son rides out of view, throwing a final wave behind him. Rick waves back, extending a tan hand and tilting it once, twice. The sun glints off his wedding band. His smile is easy, open.

Daryl wonders how he would look sidled next to this picture of a life, sinking deeper into the white lining of the coffin as Beth sings on.

Daryl imagines walking up to the man, proffering a beer. Shittier than what he’s used to drinking, maybe: a Coors, or PBR. How would Rick’s face set, taking Daryl in? Those blue eyes running over him, his jeans’ grass-stained knees, torn and ripped. The shoes that have lasted him through seven winters all scuffed leather and rubber. His cut off (lack of) sleeves and his propensity to always be carrying a large hunting knife, concealed, at his waistband. How would Officer Grimes react, under the watchful eyes of his neighbors, his wife?

“So we will drink beer all day, and our guards will give way.”

Daryl brings his hand up to his forehead, lays it there heavily against his feverish skin. Or maybe this Rick would know of him, like he knows of him now. Or knew of him, in the beginning, at the farm when he made the first move that cemented their mutual trust: Dale, minutes from turning, and the way Daryl took Rick’s weakness and covered it, bodily, for the first time—but not the last.

Rick would reach up to him, thank him in his quiet way for the can. They toast, roughly, like men do, before cracking open the push tabs and drinking deeply in one, simultaneous motion. Daryl Dixon, worth something, and invited to lean into the fresh cut grass and shoot the shit like any other member of the community. Rick’s laugh coming out easy and his shoulders relaxed underneath a cotton t-shirt—something with the logo of a charity 5K on it, or a local grocery store’s annual barbeque. They smile at each other, sharing a joke, and Rick obviously delights in drawing this expression out of him, clearly likes to see his gruffness melt like a popsicle in the sun.

Daryl would lean back onto the lawn, warm and buzzed and safe amongst the heady green scent of grass clippings. He knows he could look up at any moment and Rick would still be there, would be regarding him with a simple peace settled between his brows.

The thought of that single moment is enough to make Daryl cry.

“—and we’ll be good.”

Beth stops the song there, trailing off lightly against the keys of the piano. Daryl lays with his palms pressed impossibly tight against his face and knows that Beth is looking at him while the hot tears stuff his throat. He makes soft, involuntarily whimpering sounds like an animal struck, but she does not say anything, does not move to hug him like when he bawled, drunk, at the cabin. Just returns the favor he had paid her at the unknown father’s headstone. Sits among his sorrow and holds the space for him to mourn.

…

That night Daryl chooses the bedroom to the right, and Beth the bedroom to the left. They say their goodnights and it feels normal, feels like something Daryl has always wished for but never had.

When the morning comes, he rolls blearily to his left, finding Beth next to him on the mattress. The surprise of her form almost causes him to reach for his knife, still tucked in his belt. But it is undeniably her face there, snuggled into the plush comforter from her bed, on top of the sheets, like a caterpillar refusing to come out of the cocoon. Daryl snorts, sleepily rubbing a palm over his face.

“Got scared of the dark, huh?” He does not expect Beth to be awake, but watches a wry smile spread across her mouth.

“Nuh-uh,” Beth counters lazily, her eyes still closed. “I ain’t scared of nothin’.”

“Pfft.” Daryl rolls to the side of the bed, checking under it before placing his feet on the ground. His crossbow is still there leaned up against the nightstand, and as he throws his gaze over his shoulder at Beth he sees only her round, pale face surrounded by the heavy top sheet.

“Up and at ‘em!” he demands, descending on her with playful pokes and prods. She screams in delight and laughs until she’s out of breath, half-unraveled from her wrapping.

“I mean it,” Daryl threatens, no real backing behind it. He scoots her closer and closer to the edge of the mattress, closer and closer to pushing her unceremoniously over.

“Fine,” she grumbles, pulling the rest of the covering from her. She limps past him into her room to grab her boots.

Daryl chugs the last of the water from a jug he had brought up, then stands to retrieve her. He carries her down the steps, places her back on the piano bench in the dimness of mid-morning light filtering through the planks.

“Somethin’ happy,” he suggests. “I’ll fix us breakfast.”

Beth nods, then maneuvers to set her fingers against the keys. She pauses for a moment, thinking, before crooning, “There are things that drift away, like our endless, numbered days…”

Daryl moves into the kitchen, pulling out jar after jar to line up neatly on the small dining table between two chairs. He can hear Beth continue in the next room over, her voice bright, pure.

“There are things we can’t recall, blind as night that finds us all. But my hands remember hers, rolling ‘round the shady ferns…”

Though he has not worked Carol’s magic in any form of imagination, Daryl is proud of what he has out on the table for them. He goes back into the dim room to retrieve Beth from the piano, and she turns to him with a smile.

“You like that one?”

He nods, snorting. “It’s not exactly happy, but you’re enthusiastic about it, so.”

Beth adjusts to make it easier for Daryl to scoop her up into his arms. “Songs that mean anythin’ aren’t ever happy,” she tells him, matter-of-fact, her arm draped around the firm line of his shoulders. “At best, they’re sentimental.”

“Excuse me,” Daryl rebuts, a laugh caught in his throat at her suddenly grown-up vociferation. “I had no idea you were a professor of music, Ms. Greene.”

Beth is smiling like a teenager should be as he swings her through the door to the kitchen, careful to keep her ankle intact. He settles her down into a chair and takes the one across from her, before properly digging in to the feast laid out between them.

They spend the day inside, and for once Daryl has no desire to venture out of doors. He is happy to sit in the piano room with Beth while she figures through her songs’ accompaniments, and she is eager to teach him how to play chopsticks when he asks how she’s able to manipulate the keys enough to play whatever notes are held in her mind. They rest in the scant daylight streaming through the boarded windows, disappointed to learn that the books throughout the viewing rooms are just hollowed out home-fills for show, but morbidly curious that the funeral guestbook in the hallway has continued to be filled out in the same hand since the date of society’s fall.

They flip through the pages, some of their edges yellowed with age. Beth hums and points out the more unusual surnames, causes of death, ages. She gravitates toward spotting the young girls, Daryl notices—while he finds those closest in age to him, or with deaths that seem preventable.

“How long d’you think they go back?” Beth asks him. He takes the book from her and flips back to the first page.

“Nineteen forty-six,” he tells her. “Old as shit.”

Beth does the math in her head. “What d’you think our logs will look like in seventy years?”

“Don’t know,” Daryl responds. “I’ll be dead.”

Beth shoots him a look, then moves the thin pages back to their original crease, rights the placement of the book on its pedestal.

“C’mon,” he tells her. “Sun’s settin’. Dinnertime.”

…

“What’re the chances they haven’t come back by now—whoever’s livin’ here, lookin’ after this place?”

Beth uses both hands to lift the diet cola liter to her mouth, then picks at the tail end of a piece of okra. Daryl’s eaten two-thirds of a jar of peanut butter, this time using a spoon (at Beth’s behest). He shrugs, looking toward a slat in the window at the dusk settling out in the sky.

“Dunno. Maybe they gotta make long runs. Wasn’t much in the way of stuff how we came in.”

Beth sighs in response, screwing the cap back on the soda and leaning back in her chair. “Wish we had a map,” she says wistfully.

Daryl taps the side of his head, dropping the spoon in the jar of peanut butter and licking some off the side of his finger. “Got the best map ri’ here,” he tells her. She chuckles, rolling her injured ankle around to try and gauge its healing.

“Whatever.” Then a thought springs into her mind, and she gets up to limp down the hallway. She comes back a moment later with some paper from the sheet music, and the logbook pen.

“I’m gonna leave a thank-you note,” she tells him, sitting down again and starting to write.

“Why?”

“For when they come back. If they come back.” She shrugs, looking sad at this prospect, but then makes a bright face. “Even if they’re not comin’ back, I still wanna say thanks.”

Daryl watches her write for a minute before leaning forward across the table. “Maybe you don’t have to leave that,” he ventures hesitantly. “Maybe we stick around here for a while.”

Her face turns up to his, eyes wide.

“They come back—we’ll just make it work. They may be nuts, but, maybe it’ll be alright.”

Her face cracks into a smile, spreading slowly from corner to corner. “So—you do think there are still good people around.”

Daryl sighs. “Look Beth, I said they might be crazy. It’s still a longshot.”

“Come on,” she laughs, earnest. “What changed your mind?”

Daryl clears his throat, messing around with the peanut butter jar before drawing his hand away in annoyance. “You,” he says. “What you said to me at the cabin when we were off our asses.”

Beth’s face goes soft.

“And, well, y’know.” He keeps her eyes locked in a stare. The thing he had kept to himself while in the coffin yesterday, the thing he had tried to bury, tried to burn, tried to leave behind—it raises in his eyes. He knows this as Beth’s vision darts back and forth across his face.

“Oh,” she says, finally, and he knows she sees Rick, still there. Rick who taught him about goodness, acceptance, worth. She is neither disapproving nor angry—just surprised that, after all this, it still burns within him. She looks at him like he is the last person she would suspect to harbor such gentleness, such feeling, such hope.

But maybe hope is the wrong word for this thing inside him. Daryl just does not know how to do anything else besides it.

Is that what love is?

…

They are almost ready to settle into bed for the second time when a barking reaches Daryl’s ears, and he hears the walker fence disturbed.

He leaps up, grabbing his crossbow. Beth grabs ahold of the table like she’s about to stand, but Daryl puts a palm up to stop this movement.

“Stay,” he tells her.

He peaks through the darkness in the slats of the door, finds himself face to face with a one-eyed dog. He props the door open just a half-foot, reaching through to hold out a hand. It is white and exceptionally dirty, but he can tell it wants in. Maybe whoever was here—is here—takes care of it from time to time.

Spooked by Daryl’s unfamiliar scent, it quickly runs off.

Daryl turns at the sound of Beth’s footsteps at the end of the hall. “Told you to stay put,” he tells her. She just shrugs with a small smile gracing her face.

“But, Daryl—it was a dog.”

Exasperated, he moves back to face the doorway—except it is not empty air he meets. There are groaning walkers ambling forward, and within a half second are pressing their weights against the door.

“Beth, pry open a window,” Daryl yells back at her, his voice strangled, “get your shit!” He tries desperately to close the door but it is no use. They have come through already, and not even Beth’s added weight would do anything to impede their encroaching strength.

“I’m not gonna leave you!” she yells back, clutching to the wall with her bum ankle and three-bullet gun. They hadn’t even been able to tell if it still worked, wasn’t jammed, for fear of wasting a bullet, and here they are, in this situation, like so many situations of the past.

“ _Go_.” Daryl can only hold their extending hands off for so long. With a last look, her clear eyes feverish with adrenaline, Beth finally runs back into the darkness of the house. He feels relief wash over him when a minute later he hears a window smash, and knows she has gotten out safely. Then he lets loose the door, rushing up the stairs to the bedroom he had spent such a peaceful night in before. He throws a heavy lamp base through the glass, crawls out onto the porch roof, and shimmies down a drainpipe to the ground.

Jogging, he tries to leave as little time as possible for Beth to be alone out on the crossroads. It takes him three minutes to reach it, but when he does, a black car is kicking up leaves in its red brake light wake. It has a single white cross painted on the rear-view, and Daryl does not know what else to do but pursue it on foot.

He pursues, step after step, tracking, following, losing time. He does not stop for anything, doing this.

Then the sun rises in the sky and Daryl realizes, accepts, that he lost the trail a long time ago. Had just been following forward out of blind hope Beth would be there, her eyes wide and glad to see him again.

He collapses from fatigue into the dry, blowing dirt at a railroad crossing. He tilts his head up to the sky, exhausted breaths running through his on-fire throat.

_Blind hope— Did hope cease to exist at the advent of sight?_

He watches the carrion circle above, his empty hands open and upturned against his kneeling thighs.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Songs here are Waxahatchee - Be Good (as featured in the actual episode), and Iron & Wine - Passing Afternoon.


	3. Like Us

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Daryl meets the Claimers and finds a new way to numb himself. Covers S04E15 ~ S04E16.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> TW: Some dub-con in this. Not gratuitous or violent, just… dubious. Also the F-slur once.

The night comes back to him in shockwaves, tremors upsetting what sludge has been buried in his chest.

A black car.

Red taillights.

White cross.

Beth’s absence.

The noon sun cooks the exposed nape of his neck as he sits prone, near-groveling, in the sandy dirt of the train tracks. No food, no water—this is how Daryl exists in the world. Forgotten by the world. Forgotten by himself.

He knows Beth will not be coming back. Knows he is alone.

The hours pass this way, but Daryl does nothing to stop them from doing so. The elements ravage his body and he finds himself unable to care, unable to move—for a short hour even unsure if he breathes. A crow lands near him, hops over on its pronged feet. Nips with its beak at his flesh. The pain is sobering but he does not stop its ministrations. The thing morbid and clinging to him until it is spooked by his life, and flutters away.

Then, two black boot tips.

“Well, look’it here.”

Six men surrounding him.

A sucker punch thrown, a man in the dirt.

Daryl training his crossbow on him.

“Dammit, hold up!”

“I’m claimin’ the vest.” A slick, sick voice. “I like ‘em wings.”

“Hold up.” The voice again. The face in front of him crowned with silver. Red, red blood pouring from a nostril. Then a smile, a carrying laugh.

“A bowman,” the voice comes, still laughing. “I respect that. See, a man with a rifle, could’a been some kind of photographer or soccer coach back in the day. But a bowman’s a bowman,” the voice sighs, and hazel eyes regard him. “Through and through.”

The voice is full of praise, prideful. Daryl knew men like this, like him—this Joe. They play a good game, make those walls holding in heterosexual signifiers a thing of beauty: flashy, convincing, distracting. Usually everything in them is about violence, holding tight to it as one grips a weapon.

Daryl knows this, because he used to be this.

Always, inevitably, these men want Daryl to scale their walls. They say things like, “But my wife—but my girlfriend,” while reaching for his fly. And Daryl never really minded when it meant nothing to him. He doesn’t mind when it is just something that he’s gonna leave in the morning, anyway.

But he lowers his bow now for an entirely different reason. _You’re gonna be the last man standing_ , Daryl hears, echoey, in his ears, surrounded by six men and their ammunition, against his single bolt. He realizes, concretely, that he has given up. Given up chasing the car that has taken Beth so far away from him. Given up thinking about the chance Carol would have stuck around, and isn’t two states over by now. Given up holding out hope that he’ll pull back some tree branch in the forest and there will be Rick in his cowboy boots, standing with one knee cocked out, reloading his Python in the clearing.

He closes his eyes, blinks them heavily, looking at this Joe for a long moment while he remembers the scent of Rick’s navy flannel, the feeling of it against his nose. It seems so long ago, but there is nothing he can do about that, now.

“Daryl,” he introduces himself simply, lowering his bow and not caring too much if this means he will be shot through with forty different bullets.

This insouciant bravado alone seems enough for Joe.

…

Daryl wakes in the forest clearing before dawn. Len has saddled up to Joe’s side, and makes soft snuffling noises in his sleep. He seems a tweaker without the tweak—Daryl would know. The men’s closeness brings to mind something, something Daryl has long gone without, and he resists the urge to self-destruct as he moves out silently into the dawn-lit forest, hunting.

He’s bent, waiting for the moment, single bolt locked on a rabbit when he feels the fletching of something brush like a ghost past his ear.

Two arrows, one rabbit.

“What the hell’re you doin’?” he snarls, rounding on Len.

Len shrugs like it’s nothing. “Catchin’ me some breakfast.”

Daryl starts to stalk toward the quarry. “S’mine.”

“My arrow’s the one that hit first,” Len counters from a distance. He’s holding his ground.

“Been out here since before the sun came up,” Daryl tells him. He’s wresting the arrow points from the meat of the rabbit, trying to salvage Len’s shoddily-aimed bolt before the sourness of the rabbit’s innards leak out to taint the meat.

“The rules of the hunt,” Len continues, “don’t mean jack shit out here.”

Daryl tosses the offending arrow into the brush, turning to face Len with his entire body, already set on cutting a threatening figure.

“It’s claimed, boy,” Len spits, like this is supposed to mean anything to Daryl.

“It ain’t yours,” Daryl growls, crossing the distance between them. He wants to be close enough to get the man with his knife if he needs to, wants to be close enough to sting. Then Len’s expression shifts.

“Y’know, I’ll bet this bitch got you all messed up, hm?”

Daryl balks, the rabbit’s feet firm in his palm as he backs away.

“Am I right?” Len laughs as he starts to cut a path back to camp. “Got you walkin’ around here like a dead man.” Len’s voice is lazy, challenging. Daryl thinks of Rick’s sweet, sleeping face despite himself.

“You lost yourself a cockslut?”

Daryl stops in his tracks, moving his molars in a grinding rhythm against one another.

“Tell me something,” Len comments, “—was it one of the good’uns? The noble ones?”

Daryl flicks his hunting knife out of its sheath, imperceptible.

“Because they—don’t last too long out here,” Len ends, with the bite of an acidic laugh in his tone.

Daryl moves to stab through the man’s heart when a hand arrests his movements. It is Joe, his voice putting everything out in platitudes. Then somehow Daryl is holding the dripping half of the rabbit carcass, staring in cold disbelief as Len walks triumphantly away with the other half.

He isn’t used to being around men like this: he left that behind after the quarry, after Merle. None of the men he had come to call family were like this, pettily fighting over a damn rabbit and taking, taking—proving, always proving.

“Next time, all you gotta say—claimed.”

Joe pushes some salt and pepper (mostly salt) curls from his forehead, regarding Daryl with some scrutiny. They are now alone in the clearing.

“Hey—ass end, that’s still an end,” Joe says with a wryness in his mouth’s tilt toward one edge, mulling these words over as he stalks hesitantly away from Daryl. As if Daryl didn’t understand and needed the heavy-handed explanation of such a lingering gaze. As if he doesn’t know how bad this Extendz-eating motherfucker wants to put it in him. Why else would he care about a rabbit, or about settling this stupid score?

…

Later, at the garage, Daryl announces loudly that he is taking a piss. Instead, he collects himself on a catwalk sidling the building, a good distance above the forest floor, legs crossed like a pretzel beneath him. He leans his forehead against the rusting metal safety railing, some vestige of ordinance-abiding build that meant to make dangerous workplaces safe. Now they just allow him a vantage point from which to listen to Joe’s slow ascent over the steps of a nearby staircase, coming up to meet him where he sits, hidden.

“Hey,” Joe says, his smooth voice pouring out into the shrinking distance between them as he walks closer. “No need for that. No more walkers around here for now. Put it away.”

He is, of course, referring to Daryl’s drawn crossbow. Daryl regards him distantly.

“I’ll keep it where it is, thanks,” he replies, voice harboring a sarcastic bite. This does not deter Joe, who gathers his own limbs into a seated position next to Daryl for the time being.

“You like talking a big game, huh?” Joe posits in his meandering, inconsequential way. “All poised to kill, all the time. You never turn off, do you?”

Daryl throws a wary glance at the older man, studying his face. He isn’t unhandsome—his eyes a dark green, his silver hair retaining light and at a length where its natural curls fold in on themselves. Something about it reminds Daryl of Rick’s hair. He decides Joe is rather distinguished with his Mexi-Cali button up, all embroidered roses and skulls against waxed black cotton and tucked underneath a jean vest.

But Joe is looking at him lecherously, half-waiting for an answer. Daryl just tweaks his eyebrow and brings his bow tighter against his chest.

“What makes you think that’s what’s happenin’ here?” he growls, finally, lowly. The other Claimers are set up inside, and the distance away from them doesn’t make Daryl too nervous anything will be overheard. They are a semi-nocturnal group, seeking the daylight hour’s embrace for short bouts of sleep to be able to move freely in the cover of the night. It is remarkable that they had even been able to come upon him, alone as he was, during the late afternoon sun’s illumination. Pure chance.

“Because it is,” Joe replies. “Isn’t it?”

The question is not a question, but a challenge. Casual as he is, Joe does not give away the violence Daryl knows is harbored in his limbs—he thinks, either this is the hill he dies upon or, he gives in. Hands his body over, wholly, to the older man sitting opposite him on the shaded catwalk concrete.

“Didn’t pin you for a fag,” Daryl tries, one last attempt at making the older man balk at his own desires. Joe just laughs lowly at the slur, almost appreciative, the sound biting.

“I ain’t if you ain’t,” comes the dangerous reply. Daryl kind of knew it would be useless—the other man had already sniffed him out, already knew what he had wanted to lay claim to.

Daryl does not know exactly when Joe moves to take his mouth against his own, just that he has already resigned to letting it happen. This is, and always was, going to be the trajectory of the moment, and, amongst all this toxic male bravado, Daryl cannot push from his mind the thought of Rick. As badly as he wishes he did not think of anything, during this, he thinks of that honorable man working the fields, tending to the crops, bringing buckets to water their dry roots. The special attention he paid to the vulnerable growing things, reasonable and gentle. Productive, sustaining, the right kind of strength held in his calloused hands.

Joe’s mouth tastes of something sour and foreign, that Daryl cannot put his finger on, and ultimately finds that he does not want to. He shuts his mind off entire, becoming an animal thing that only has needs and does not have an inkling of a thought, one way or another, about how this experience will end up.

Joe pushes into him without much forethought. Daryl’s pleasure is clearly not tantamount in the man’s mind, despite how debonair he may presume to be: He is a selfish lover, only _loving_ is not what one could conscionably call this act. Daryl grits his teeth, unchanged by the realization the other man is soon close to climax. He thinks the experience will be spared him after Joe pulses inside him, but feels the man’s mouth descend on his cock like something akin to desire made material.

Daryl groans despite himself, arching up into the unexpected touch. They are still both clothed, only bare enough to meet the necessity of the act, so Joe is pulling up his pants as he sucks Daryl into his hollowing cheeks. The other man expects this to be quick work, Daryl realizes. He feels that it may be, even though the fact is surprising to even himself. It had been a long time for him, longing for Rick; a long time since that last week of every night, every morning in the other man’s cell.

He came to anticipate it like one anticipates a soothing rain—came to rely on it, cherish it, venerate it with his hips. Make it holy.

Rick and his soft lips pressing to his own.

 _Rick_. Those open hips pressing, pushing down on his length.

Rick. How he could cry, now, with this name echoing around his skull. But there is no longer an altar at which Daryl can worship, can let these tears out to stain his cheeks.

Distractedly Daryl reaches down, runs a hand through Joe’s hair and grasps it almost tenderly. He cums hard without warning, loosing his load into Joe’s mouth, thinking about the dead sheriff.

Daryl lays prone against the floor for some time after, not moving despite Joe’s own stirring. There really isn’t anything to do except rest—this group different in that they prey on others’ hard work instead of doing their own. But Daryl, Daryl doesn’t care enough right now to go through the motions of self-survival.

In fact, he starts to sink once more into self-hatred.

Joe is moving up to lean against his elbow and forearm, shooting Daryl another lecherous look.

“Knew you’d be open and ready for me.”

Daryl suppresses the anger that roils to the surface of him. He instead swallows it, pushes it down and further down, still. He makes use of his ability to block out everything around him, ensuring that no voice can touch him where he lays. Ensuring that he could keep laying here forever, if only he was left alone. That he could die like this, not drinking water, not eating. He could just waste away like so many others, forgotten by time.

Eventually he reaches down and tucks himself back into his jeans, zips up. The effort it takes to do this one thing is insurmountable, and he only stares at the canopy of leaves above as Joe stands, moves away from him as he proves to be an impervious, uninteresting participant to this ribbing.

“I’m in love with a cop, y’know,” Daryl finds himself muttering as the man moves away from his prone form to enter the garage once more. Joe’s step hitches, and he turns at this out-of-place admission.

“Love,” the man quotes. “The desire to destroy somethin’ beautiful, ‘cos somethin’ beautiful has destroyed you.”

Daryl doesn’t say anything to this. Joe just laughs.

“Where is he, then?”

Daryl brings the back of his hand against his forehead. He is tired, he is nonexistent, he is back in that coffin but Beth is nowhere near.

“Dead.”

It is the first time he’s admitted out loud the fate he thinks Rick has met. He lowers his lashes, closing his eyes tight. No sound comes from Joe’s direction, and eventually, the other man simply walks away.

Daryl feels the world at large start to spin, spinning around him—not stopping, not even for a second.

…

He chews on a cinnamon stick from the country club, wishing it were a cigarette—wishing he had whisky, too. But besides what Joe was offering to share with him earlier from his own stash, he only has cigarillos. The slim cigars aren’t his favorite, cloying, heavy, and semi-sweet. But they are something to take the edge off, and he needs to make them last.

He makes the decision to rejoin the rest of the group on the cooler concrete floor inside the building. He has his trash bag suitcase next to him, figuring he should at least attempt to get used to this group at the same time they try to get used to him. No need for words, for this: just proximity, and soon everyone will understand one another. Because as much as he wishes these weren’t the people they are, it’s impossible to do anything without people, anymore.

Or so he thinks. Soon Len is there, talking shit about the rabbit again. Daryl thinks he’d be happy if he never saw or heard of another rabbit in his life.

Then Joe puts himself in the middle of it, and this pisses Daryl off even more.

“Now Daryl says he didn’t take that half of the rabbit, so we got a little conundrum here. Either he’s lyin’, which is an actionable offense, or you planted it on him like some punk-ass, pussy, coward, cheatin’ cop.”

At the mention of the word cop, Daryl swears he can hear some jealousy raise in Joe’s voice. Daryl wonders distantly if Joe liked their tumble enough to choose him over Len, to keep choosing him, or if the moment had sated his desire and steadied his hand.

Then Joe is asking Len, “Did you?” and Daryl cannot see a way out of this without blood being shed.

His bag is dumped unceremoniously against the concrete. For a moment Daryl sees a murderous glint in Joe’s eye, that debonair façade once again breaking. But then he is siccing the other Claimers on Len, their fists and steel toed boots biting into the man’s flesh with wet packing sounds. Daryl can only stand to look for a moment before he bends to collect his things once more into the trash bag, certain that they will not stop until Len is dead. He retrieves his things and heads back out to the catwalk, shutting the door on the violence, slipping down the wall until he is sitting, trying to steady his breathing. He does not return until nightfall.

When he wakes up on the hard, poured concrete floor, the first thing he sees is the tell-tale signs smeared in blood next to him: Len is dead. He knows this as a tracker.

Then the body outside, dumped just over the edge of where he and Joe had fucked, confirms it—almost a warning, it is.

…

He has given in and is smoking a cigarillo as Joe hands him the silver flask. They cut through a field of tall grasses, and some train tracks raise on top of a mound a while off. He thinks Joe may like him in a way, and wonders if he has been officially _claimed_ with an unfeeling, detached amusement.

Daryl doesn’t care, and that’s the long and short of it. The older man’s smooth voice approaches mildness at times, almost enough to make Daryl think he is just a normal guy when he isn’t thinking too hard, paying too much attention. There is even a protective edge to it when he says, “Go slow with that, your stomach’s probably emptier than you think.”

Not that Daryl Dixon needs a lesson on drinking white whiskey. He swallows a hearty mouthful, grimacing slightly as the liquid bites and claws on its way down, and hands the flask back to a sharply bemused Joe.

“I ain’t been lit at dawn since before everything fell apart.”

“Fell apart?” Joe says. “Never looked at it like that. Seems to me like things are finally startin’ to fall together. At least for men like us.”

Daryl gives him a long look from the corner of his eye. This is something he could do without—the proclivity Joe has to use the term _us_. Daryl never liked being lumped in with anyone on a good day, but he certainly can’t help but get rankled that Joe thinks he knows him enough to say this so cavalierly. This is part of it, yes—But also, Daryl does not wish to become a Claimer. Does not wish to take Len’s place amongst the ranks as a bowman, nor as Joe’s fuckthing.

As they cross more field of grass, Daryl ponders the visceral reaction within him dimly, made distant by the homebrew. Maybe it really could be so simple, he admits to himself. He thinks for a moment that maybe it would be easier for it to be simple, to just stop thinking so much. Stop caring about his individuality, about the grey between the black and white and just… exist, with these men, with Joe.

Or, not exist.

He puts the thought to bed inside him. Swallows it like the white lightning.

At the tracks now, he sees Tony eye something growing on the mound, and the thought of _us_ claws back up from inside him.

“Claimed,” Daryl says like there is gravel in his throat, pulling the single red radish entire from the ground and into his fists. Dirt shakes loose from its weak roots, and all Daryl thinks about is the crops at the prison going up in flames.

Then Joe is beside him, pulling his mouth to his with a rough laugh. None of the other men seem to be surprised at this action, so Daryl can indeed confirm to himself he has been claimed.

“See?” Joe is bellowing. “You got the hang of it, now, boy.”

Daryl licks the other man’s saliva from his lips. He does not even like radishes, but it is _his_ , and the fire has stopped burning in his mind, and the sickeningly proud look on Joe’s features is _his_ doing.

Claimed.

…

They stop a little while up the tracks, bedding down for a few hours.

Joe takes him again, this time amongst the other men, and Daryl once more immediately fists Joe’s mane in his fingers. He almost likes the feeling of the man’s oily, coarse hair between them as he is rawed without mercy or consideration, in full view as the other Claimers amble about—regarding them locked in coitus as if it were just another half-uninteresting environmental stimulus to acknowledge, assess, and move on from.

It does not matter because they are both buzzed, so Daryl is even more unfeeling than before, idly locked on to just the older man’s hair as his pants echo around space. All he thinks about is how Joe’s curls are so much like what Rick’s would have been in ten, fifteen years.

They don’t touch afterward, don’t stay around each other. After drinking down the gift of an entire amber-colored handle from Joe, Daryl eventually finds himself numbed enough to sleep.

When he wakes, he is planning as the dark sets on, planning how he will leave. Without telling them, without saying so, he thinks. He hasn’t done anything, and so they will let him go, will not follow. Joe said as much, not in so many words, but in the code. Daryl never said he would stay; he didn’t lie. And he, dimly, isn’t worried about covering his tracks. They are good trackers, but not as good as he is.

They walk for some miles through the forest in silence.

Then there is a small campfire up ahead, something partially obscured by an old blue Chevy Blazer. Tony comes back from scouting ahead, and Daryl watches as Joe and Tony’s eyes meet, confirm something.

“We’ve caught up to him, Daryl, my boy,” Joe murmurs to him, voice like a slow-moving poison, clasping a heavy hand over the nape of his neck. “Time to exact the laws of nature against this breathing shit stain. Show him what the Claimer’s code is.”

Daryl is amazed at how easily these men slip through the forest after their prey, and thinks that he can use this as his chance to get away. He is hanging at the back of the group, silent, sure to note that every other one of the men is focused on the task at hand before he makes a move. Joe reaches the quarry first, then Tony, and Daryl can tell that they are just two people—Daryl cannot see them but can hear, and for just one moment plays out the scene in his mind’s eye based on sound cues from the Claimers drawing their weapons, rushing out of the forest to join Joe.

“Today is a day of reckoning, sir,” Daryl hears Joe growl, and knows they have cornered their quarry. “Restitution.”

He is ashamed to say it, but Daryl cannot bring himself to care. He makes a wide circle away from this burgeoning altercation as he hears Joe’s voice ring out like commandments into the cold air. Daryl’s breath puffs in front of him as he moves silently on the edge of the forest, and then he sees it. A comic book, its pages blown by the slight breeze passing, half-mired into a sodden puddle in the road.

_Carl._

“Ten Mississippi,” Joe’s voice carries. Daryl picks up his pace, running back, now, with his trash bag still in hand and his crossbow drawn. “Nine Mississippi,” Joe continues, and Daryl sees only his breath floating out in puffs in front of him, the cold air like a shock to his system. “Eight Mississippi,” Joe taunts, and that is when Daryl rounds the side of the Blazer and sees—him—with a gun to his temple.

“Joe,” Daryl yells, not taking his eyes from Rick’s. Benediction, he thinks distantly. He feels a relief so strong the ground does not seem solid or real. But this is not long-lived; Danger, real, present, and immediately permeating his nerves almost gives him whiplash. “Hold up,”’ he says, and the voice that comes out of him is close to a sob.

Rick’s blue eyes are wide in the firelight. Then they are shifting, taking in within the space of a second that Daryl is with these men. Knows them. Rick squints and Daryl cannot bear the confusion, the betrayal that marks the other man’s face so clearly. He keeps staring, keeps trying to bring forth the silent words that they had used to communicate with for so long—the fine musculature of their faces moving with a language all their own. But it is hard, it has been too long, he has buried it—whatever comes to mind, now, he simply cannot. He cannot get through to Rick in the space of this one second that feels like eternity.

 _I thought you were dead_ , he wants to cry.

He wants to drop to his knees and crawl in the dirt to cover his shame.

“You’re stopping me on eight, Daryl,” Joe warns. Daryl dares move closer, somehow able to keep on his own two feet. The man with grey hair who looks to him reminds him nothing of Rick—is but a pale specter of his shame made incarnate—something Daryl wishes to wipe out of existence. He realizes how little the older man’s body meant, and how much damage he managed to do with it. How easily Daryl could have, maybe should have, slit his throat in the throes of it, been killed by the other Claimers, and been done.

“Just hol’ up,” he repeats, stronger this time. His brain starts winding, figuring. He locks his eyes on the older man’s, taking them from Rick’s for the first time. Something shifts in Joe and he opens his non-dominant hand into a gesture of tenuous ease and allowance.

“Alright. Say your piece, Daryl.”

He nods, looking back to Rick, seeing a single one of the man’s eyes squint.

“These people,” he starts, resolved, demanding. “You’re gonna let ‘em go.” He motions toward the both of them, Rick and Michonne. “These are good people.”

Joe’s mouth turns up cruelly. “Now, I think Lou’d disagree with that.”

Daryl starts to shake his head, but Joe’s hand comes up, halting him. “I’ll of course have to speak for him, ‘cause your friend, here, strangled him in a bathroom,” Joe finishes, a dangerous mirth lacing the words. The gun shifts at Rick’s temple and Rick closes his blue eyes on instinct, out of barely suppressed fear.

“You want blood,” Daryl says, deciding. “I get it.” He walks a few more paces forward, tossing his bow to the asphalt. “Take it from me, man.” His voice is low as if he were talking to a feral animal, almost soothing. It is not goading or presumptuous, but slippery, enticing, and his arms are out at his sides. He is defenseless. “C’mon.”

If it is between him or Rick, then it must be him, Daryl thinks. That’s how it was always supposed to be.

Joe’s face drops in disbelief. His tanned forehead knits its two white eyebrows together. “This man killed our friend. You say he’s good people, but see, that right there—is a lie.”

Daryl feels his hands hit his thighs numbly, and he is not thinking of himself—he is thinking of the man yelling at him, now, all debonair trappings cast off to reveal the true violence underneath, and how the gun he is holding shakes against Rick’s temple with too-long suppressed rage.

A thread, snapping.

The first blow from the butt of a rifle lands and almost as soon as it does, before the pain even hits, Daryl hears Rick cry, “No,” as though it could tear his throat to shreds.

“Teach him fellas,” Joe is cajoling them, the Claimers, his once smooth voice now full of viscera, of acid, of blood. “Teach him all the way.”

A punch against his eye sends him reeling against the filthy surface of the Blazer, and Daryl thinks in a lightning-fast second that Joe is angry, because he realizes Daryl had been leaving. That drop in his face a tell—but a tell for what?

 _I guess he liked me more than I thought,_ he wonders to himself, brief, as he feels fists meet his ribs and stomach from every angle _._ Then there are steel toed boots coming at him, and he catches sight of Joe’s crazed face past Tony’s shoulder, and sees what has transpired there.

It must be as plain as day, still, the look on his own face—that this is his dead cop, reanimated. The man he loves, alive.

Daryl is learning that Joe’s jealousy, vengeful, is a fatal thing to behold. How unnecessary it all was, and is.

Daryl is beaten to the fallen leaves against the road, against the dirt and the dead pine needles poking him where his shirt has been ripped. There are no distinguishable sounds, all of it mixing—Joe’s static hilarity, Carl’s whimpering cries, Dan’s sick laughter, grunts that Daryl is not sure are his or the Claimers’, and of course, as if in a dream, Rick’s voice between them all.

Then there is a gunshot, ringing, and Daryl feels like his insides are being clawed apart.

Desperate, he tries to get away from the men encircling him to see what it was, to see if Rick—

Then the world rights itself under his feet as he lands a punch, as he turns in time to see Michonne cover him with Tony’s six-shooter. He sees Tony down, sees Joe felled, Joe’s neck spouting a stream of blood, and Rick sinking Joe’s knife into Dan’s chest while Michonne grabs Carl away to safety.

Daryl holds onto the Blazer’s hood, can only try to regain his winded breath as Rick pulls Joe’s knife up through Dan’s stomach as if he were field dressing a deer. The blade goes up through the zipper of the man’s flesh, not stopping even as the popping cracks of sternum and rib bones snapping under the blade ring out into the cold night air. Dan’s guts are all steam and slick pouring out of him at his own feet and Rick’s feet, those boots like viper heads lapping at the thick liquid ropes of organ.

It is a long time before Rick stops—Daryl staggering over, pulling Rick from Dan’s corpse, coming between him and Carl to shield the boy from this, as hopeless of an endeavor as that may be. It is different restraining this Rick than the Rick he had to protect in the boiler room of the prison, all those months ago, when the man was near-comatose from grief. Now he is alive, writhing and burning with rage, and fighting viciously against Daryl’s arms.

Then Daryl is hissing, withdrawing electric-quick from Rick as blood blooms in the palm of his hand. A shock runs over Rick’s face as Daryl draws in a breath, sharply—a single cut from Joe’s knife against the palm of his hand, bloody.

“Daryl,” Rick finally says, dropping the knife to the ground, in order to cover the cut with his own bloodied fingers. “Shit, I’m so—”

But Daryl is pulling away quickly, moving back, nodding to Michonne. “You get Carl in the four by four. Walkers’re gonna be on us any second now from all that noise.”

Daryl rends the already-ripped hem of his shirt and ties it tightly around his hand to stop the bleeding, while Rick looks on from the asphalt, still in shock. Daryl is making quick work of picking up his crossbow, collecting a rifle off the body of a dead Claimer and tossing it to Rick. The man catches it but looks like he does not know what to do with it. Looks like he does not know where he is, suddenly.

“Gonna drag these bodies into the forest,” Daryl mutters, going around to each and sinking his hunting knife into their skulls. “Hopefully fill a few bellies with their flesh instead’a ours.”

He starts to pull Tony off by the wrists, but stops as Rick remains motionless there.

“Rick. You good?” he calls out, harsher than he intended but probably necessary. Rick is blinking.

“Yeah.” But it sounds more like a question, than an answer.

…

By the time Daryl is done with the bodies, the ache of the beatings is setting in and the adrenaline of the encounter is wearing off. It is dawn and there is a stream nearby where he cleans his cut, brings cool water to his abdomen with his red rag, keeps it there like a compress for the few minutes he can spare.

There is plantain growing near to where he kneels, spread leaves colored green and pink. Daryl takes a single leaf and chews it to a pulp in his mouth, presses the mush into the cut on his palm, wraps it with another ripped off piece of his shirt and ties it, tight.

Joe’s corpse, with its black cotton shirt slick with blood, is buried underneath the bodies somewhere behind him, packed up like sandbags in a mound. He spits on the underbrush as he makes his way back to the road with the Claimer’s packs, calling out behind him, “ _Claimed_ ,” in the most sarcastic voice he can manage. “Fuckers.”

He finds Rick with the rifle laid across his lap, his hands shaking, sat up against the flat tire of the now sheet-covered Blazer. He pulls a bottle of water from one of the Claimer’s packs before tipping it against his rag.

“We should save it,” Rick’s surprisingly soft, steady voice floats up to him. “To drink.”

Daryl just shakes his head gently, reaching out with the hand Rick had not sliced. “You can’t see yourself,” he murmurs back, motioning inside the Blazer. “But Carl can.”

Rick moves the rifle from his lap then takes the rag with shaking hands, eyes raised to Daryl’s like he isn’t sure if he’s seeing a ghost or not. The fabric slips from Daryl’s fingers slowly, and he moves to take a seat next to Rick as the man attempts to make a dent in the now-dry blood stick on his skin.

Daryl presses his upper arm against Rick’s, and after a moment looks out into the forest beyond. “I didn’t know what they were,” he tells Rick softly, in lieu of the fifty other things running through his head. He still quite hasn’t shaken the stark desire to cry.

But Rick just nods, the acceptance of this easy. “How’d you come to be with ‘em?”

Daryl clears the lump from his throat. “Me and Beth got out together, an’ I was with her for a while.” He flexes his fingers against the bandage around the back of his hand, watching the fine tendons move against the fabric and self-defense bruises alike, and falls silent.

“Is she dead?”

He brings his eyes to Rick’s, focus sliding from left to right, right to left. He shrugs smally, painfully.

“She’s just gone.”

Rick’s eyes do not leave his for a long minute. A breeze stirs some of the dead leaves underfoot against the asphalt, flaps the nylon edge of one of the Claimers’ packs. Daryl feels inspected, feels understood, feels forgiven. Rick’s eyes go back to the rag, wiping it absently over his fingers as Daryl continues.

“That’s when they found me. I mean, I knew they were bad, but.” He shoots a look over at Rick. “They had a code. It was stupid, and simple.” He is glad the other man does not meet his eyes. “It was somethin’.”

Rick hums. “And, you were alone.”

Daryl nods. “I was gonna leave—was, leavin’. But then I saw you three. Right when you saw me.” He swallows, unable to look at Rick any longer. “Rick, I—I didn’t know what they were capable of.”

From the corner of his eye, he sees Rick’s face fall to try and catch his gaze. “It’s not on you, Daryl,” the other man says, tone earnest. “Hey.”

He turns his head. Rick’s expression is gentle despite the blood—his curled hair greyer somehow, but soft. His eyes kind. Daryl takes a long look at that face soaked in dried viscera. How is he doing it, making a face so full of clemency, exactly when Daryl needs it the most?

Rick’s hands have stopped shaking and Daryl wants to reach out to grasp one in his own, splay his fingers between those there in front of him, but is paralyzed by his still-present shame. He finds it hard to feel anything besides that shame.

“It’s not on you,” Rick repeats, not moving his eyes for even one moment from Daryl’s. “You bein’ back here, that’s not nothin’. That’s everythin’.” Rick lets out a quiet, sad sigh as he stares. “You tradin’ yourself for me…. You’re my brother, Daryl.”

Daryl raises his head at this claim, searching Rick’s face, ensuring it was not something he heard wrong, or made up. The words sink slowly into the center of him, pushed by eddies in the tumult the shame is causing, ebbing up against the tide of the love he feels. And Rick is nodding to make sure that Daryl knows it is true, knows that he feels this, means it, entire. Daryl sees that. He feels it.

Finally, he speaks. “What you did last night… Anyone would’a done that.”

But Rick just shakes his head.

“It ain’t you,” Daryl tells him, firm.

“It is.” Rick regards him again, worrying the red rag in his hands, rubbing it between his fingers again. “It’s a part of me, that violence.”

Daryl knits his brows, stays silent, but does not accept this. Understands this, but does not accept it. He finally hauls himself up from against the flat tire, reaching down to Rick with an offering palm. He does not know what else to do, to say.

“C’mon. There’s a stream a ways off. We’ll get you clean.”

Rick regards him hesitantly, not yet taking his hand. “Daryl, I—”

_I thought you were dead._

But Daryl cuts him off. “I know,” he replies, gentle. “But we survived.”

_Men like us._

He pulls Rick to his feet and they set out to the stream, where Daryl bends again to dip the red rag in its running water, ice cold, and wipe gently the rest of the blood off Rick’s cheeks, temples, forehead. He cups some in his palm, bringing it to Rick’s beard, sluicing it carefully over the hollow of his neck, his jugular. Daryl works diligently for several minutes, his fingers eventually losing some feeling from the frigid temperature of the water, the air.

Rick watches his eyes the whole time he does this, but Daryl cannot bring himself to meet them. When Rick has begun to look like himself again, Daryl’s ministrations slow and he wipes his thumb absently over Rick’s jaw.

“C’mere,” Rick murmurs. Daryl raises his eyes.

Rick draws him into a long embrace that he is reticent to return. There is the shock of Rick’s warm, wet body pressed against his. There is the way all Daryl has done with every waking second is numb himself to the world, withdraw into himself, become smaller and smaller since the prison burned, hoping to disappear completely and never be found. He never wanted to feel anything, again, so he does not know how much more unreality he can take: Unreality like Rick here, in front of him, with his forgiveness and those slim, strong arms around him. He begins to shake in Rick’s grasp.

Then he is hugging back fiercely, pulling Rick’s jacket to him with everything he has—enveloping the other man entire into his own arms.

“Fuckin’ missed you,” Rick is whispering, and Daryl is surprised that either one of them can breathe with how close they clasp one another. He presses his face into Rick’s neck, breathing deeply past the tears.

They hold each other while the minutes pass, pass like the water through the stream, and do not stop passing.


	4. Fever Dreams

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Rick POV chapter. This takes place during S04E01-E03-E09-E16/S05E01, with some S03E05 and pre-change flashbacks. Whew.

The cool wash of cistern water over his neck is something sacred, combating the already crushing heat of the day. He draws on his thick gardening gloves over his damp skin, moving the earbuds into his ears, and sets to work in the good earth to some hillbilly song about precious memories.

It is still early, and not everyone at the prison is up and ambling around yet. It is a long time before Michonne returns with the chestnut mare, pulling from the saddle bags comics for Carl.

Soon Hershel is speaking with him, his gait over the uneven ground only slightly so. He has gotten used to his prosthetic quickly, acclimating to the foreign limb.

The sun is in his eyes as Hershel starts, “Nothing wrong with stayin’ close, Rick. Everyone understands.”

Rick regards him distantly, one eye squinted, listening to the mare’s heavy breaths behind him and her tail flicking away insects from her haunches. He pats her as the older man continues;

“You’re growing us enough food, so we won’t need to do runs, soon. But we do have to find you a good pair of overalls. You need to look the part.”

Rick laughs easily, but he is wary. The older man is building up to something, he knows, and all he can do is stand there and wait.

“A lil’ piece of wheat outta the corner of your mouth.”

“Yeah,” Rick chuckles, noncommittal, moving his eyes to look around the yard at others going about their work.

“Listen—the rest of the Council: Daryl, Glenn, Carol, Sasha, all of ‘em,” Hershel intones, “they wanted me to talk to you.”

Rick picks up on the hesitancy between the words, and wonders if it was truly a unanimous decision. Hershel’s gaze has turned serious.

“When you go out there, you gotta take your gun.”

Rick smirks, regarding Hershel for a long time. “It’s just outside the fence,” he demurs. “I have my knife. I get in trouble, six bullets ain’t gonna make the difference.”

He sounds resolute even to his own ears, without meaning to be. The edge of Hershel’s mouth falls.

“Rick, we want you to be safe,” the man emphasizes. “Bring your gun.”

But Rick rebuts lowly, challenging. “Something’s giving me the feelin’ this wasn’t the whole Council. Daryl—he put you up to this, hm?”

Hershel doesn’t reply. Rick nods his head curtly, taking this as an affirmative. He pats the chestnut mare’s neck, nuzzles his palm into her nose’s sharp movement toward him. Reciprocates.

“Look,” Hershel starts again, and Rick bites his tongue. “I’ve seen—well, I’ve just known. For a while now. And that’s fine—” Hershel chuckles to himself. “You ain’t gonna hear no lines about sinners nor hellfire from me, young man. That ain’t God’s way in matters of the heart. Just…” The older man pauses while Rick sets his jaw, not meeting those kind eyes wrinkled so slightly around the corners. “Get your house in order. Your doghouse, maybe.”

Rick still cannot look. “Alright,” he assents. “I’ll take a gun.”

He stalks off more unceremoniously than usual, his mind going a mile a minute. It is one thing to be vulnerable with Daryl—to have that time for them alone—but it is something else entirely for anyone outside of them to know. The fact that Hershel is aware, has said anything about it, leaves a bad taste in his mouth, leaves him humorless and dark as he stalks up the yard and back into the coolness of the prison.

Rick is holding on to something, he knows, and it had grown hard in his heart despite the tenderness that Daryl—that he had allowed Daryl to pour upon him. It takes him a long time to acclimate to it, even in so frequent of intervals. It helps when he can manage to goad the other man into roughness, into whispering filthy phrases into his ear. He does this because he cannot stand the alternative, sometimes. The care and concern so apparent in those squinted eyes regarding him when Daryl thinks he cannot be seen, they raise a fine, shining shame right in the center of him. It is a knife wound so sharp he does not know it is there until the pain is an inextinguishable line of fire renting him through.

Rick is ashamed of it, but the soft intimacy makes him think of Lori, think of Shane. He thinks of their deaths every day, and wonders if the others regard him this way: Can see their eyes full of pity and the memory of Lori never far from the surface of their minds when they see him. Even just now with Hershel and his easy acceptance, Rick felt angered that there was a possibility the man saw him not as a wounded warrior, but a wounded widower. Or even just saw him at all, any modicum of his pain.

Rick knows that at its core, this shame comes from failure. Failure to serve and protect those he loved—those he once loved. Keep them from becoming so unlike themselves that they slipped from this mortal plane.

Rick pushes past the privacy curtain of his cell, lifting a leg up hastily to remove a boot and struggling in a standing position to do so. When he finally does pull his foot free, he hurls the boot against the wall with a fury. The sound that cracks out into the air echoes, but he is too busy slamming his fist into the doorjamb to be concerned with who might hear. His breath comes out in heavy pants. He is brittle, brokenly angry and Daryl is busy, is not going to be there—is getting ready to leave on a run.

With a rough movement Rick sucks in a breath, holds it, changes from his farming clothes. Finally he grabs his gun belt to wrap once more around his waist, gone unaccustomed to it, yet the weight of it remaining insidiously familiar. He sets his jaw as he opens the chamber to his Python, checks and then spins it, clicks it back into place.

Out by the gate, when Daryl pulls up on his bike, Rick is hesitant to stand too close to the man. Still, as Daryl moves to lay his palm against the expanse of Rick’s stomach, the gesture seems to stretch only between the two of them, only for the one second of its existence—hearkening to an intimacy shared by only them. Daryl’s eyes catch the abundant sun, locking with Rick’s own. The anger melts from him, and he nods in acknowledgement of this, jogs ahead, opens the gate for this man.

The man he loves.

…

Rick can feel the blood welled in his left eye, the pressure of it, pulsing as if it had a heart of its own. Each footfall sends a shock of pain up through the bones of his leg to his thigh, where he had managed to tie off the damage the round had done. Rick swallows around a dry throat, rasping—trying not to think about the blown-through skin of the exit wound that he had to shove full of some clean tear of cloth that Carl had found for him. Trying not to think of the prison and the smoke and the tank-trampled crops. About Judith, about Hershel. About which members of his family may or may not be dead.

About Daryl.

Carl walks adamantly ahead of him, the physically unscathed boy easily surpassing his limping and shuffling gait.

Pain shoots through him now, except it is not physical. He holds a hand to his stomach, his ribs, tersely calling for Carl to slow down. Then he is begging. Then Carl’s face with an expression like a brick wall turns to regard him, concealing behind it the same fear Rick feels. Though those blue eyes are his, Rick can only seem to see Daryl in them—the same stubbornness to not admit defeat, a refusal to give in.

“We’re gonna be—” He cannot even bring himself to say it. _Okay_.

It hits home when Rick does not see Daryl’s Triumph outside of Joe and Joe Jr.’s: This will not be like after the farm, where they all found one another on the highway. Daryl will not come rolling up on the infernally loud bike, will not reach out, will not shake his hand.

This is why Rick can’t bring the words to his lips, not even for Carl’s sake—because they are not okay. He is not okay. He cannot lie any longer, play at anything else other than the damaged being he is.

…

“This is gonna be sprained at least a week.”

Rick hisses as Hershel runs antiseptic over his bloodied knuckles, biting back the pain of the sharp liquid needling into his skin.

“Good news, none of these cuts need stitches.”

Rick is only dimly aware the other man is looking at him. The pain, even, as overwhelming as it is, does little to focus his senses. There is just a whirlpool opening on the floor where he stares, black and haze biting at the edges of his vision.

“You okay?”

“Hurts,” he manages.

“I wasn’t talking about the hand,” Hershel continues.

Rick feels something soft brush his skin, wrap it, compress it. The pain is amplified but only for a minute, and then it evens itself out into one steady throb across his fingers, the back of his hand. It is so different to how it felt to lay into Tyreese, all of that mismanaged anger in Rick finally finding a target in the man’s threat against his person. It felt—clean. To finally have an enemy, no matter how misguided, in front of him, defined and immediate, instead of misty and omniscient.

The rage—the rage felt good. Purposeful. It gave him a purpose. It was only afterward that it all came rushing back to him: The shame and everything it carried.

“Everythin’ we been trying so hard to keep out—it found its way in.”

Rick moves his head. But he does not turn to the man helping heal him, he turns to where his gun belt lays as a coiled snake, the glint of his Python like high noon sun against scales.

“No,” Rick says, the sound a little more than a sigh as a tear drips down the bridge of his nose. “It’s always there.”

Hershel’s stare is cold when he meets it, angry.

“Christ, Rick, I’ve fallen off the wagon before.”

Rick almost laughs, a dark humor rising in him. He motions with the hand Hershel is still bandaging, still showing care to despite Rick’s sharp insouciance. “That what this is?”

“Somethin’ like it, yeah,” Hershel says, his eyes hard and bright. “And when it happened, I didn’t stand around feelin’ bad about it, I got back up. I had responsibilities, and people to keep safe.”

Rick swallows, shaking away the slow tears that well in his eyes. “Think I’ve done enough damage for today.”

Hershel finally lets some of his anger seep into his ministrations, roughly tying off the wrapping at the heel of Rick’s hand and pushing it away from him.

“Don’t you think you should be through takin’ breaks by now, young man?”

…

They find a house, one as good as anything. It is bereft of walkers and so, Rick feels they can be here. It’s got boarded windows, and a working door, and the couch is heavy enough to block an onslaught.

After moving it against the doorframe, Rick feels as though he may just simply stop existing in this world—that’s how tired he is, how little fight he has left in him from the journey to get here. From dragging behind him everything they have lost—dragging behind him his own lost sense of self.

But Carl is working a cord around the knob, and he can only look on at his son’s ministrations. Carl notices this, scoffing with some acid in the tone.

“It’s a clove hitch. Shane taught me—you remember him?”

Rick sets his jaw even though it takes everything he has. He runs his tongue over his blistered bottom lip before replying, “I remember him. Every day.”

Carl’s stare is hard. Rick knows what the boy is looking at—the gruesome visage made apparent to him when he went into the bathroom and saw himself in the vanity mirror, not twenty minutes prior. The look of his face, his ribs, his thigh—all of it would require hospitalization in the old days, especially the eye. He is surprised he does not cry blood when he realizes he cannot cry, is too exhausted to. In this one second to himself that he manages to find in the dark of the half bath, his chest hollows out.

When he returns to the living room Carl is taking the cushions from the couch, using a found blanket to settle in for the night. Rick takes up a place against the cloth-covered springs of the furniture, against the long-stale crumbs and forgotten coins in the crevasses. He stares at Carl’s rigid shoulder, his son’s resolute back, until darkness overcomes him.

Though, eventually, the darkness dissipates, and Rick feels life underneath his palm—Carl, quickening, the size of something he can hold easily inside one of his hands, inside Lori’s five-month pregnant belly.

He is back in their one-bedroom apartment near Atlanta, in bed. Shane covers Rick’s naked side with a bare arm, the fingers of which brush Lori’s thigh as the man softly breathes, asleep. Lori is on her back and Rick is turned toward her, and she is smiling. They start laughing, for no reason in particular. Rick is almost thirty years old.

Their laughter stirs Shane, who, smiling, moves closer against Rick’s spine.

“Y’all tellin’ jokes without me?” Shane murmurs, his voice rough with sleep. With a slight nod at Lori, Rick takes his partner’s hand and places it where his had been just a moment ago, covering those thick fingers with his own. He waits until Carl kicks again, turning to look at Shane’s expression as it happens. The man’s eyes flash open, focusing on Rick’s with a widening of his pupils. Rick chuckles, moving to take those rough, surprised lips between his own as Lori watches on.

When Rick pulls away from the lilting kiss, opens his eyes, he is in the boiler room of the prison with a cold blood-slick arm, knife gripped tight, a walker with a distended belly cut open in front of him.

He is screaming.

Then there are arms around him which hold his own arms tightly to his sides, arresting him as his voice tears bloody into the depths of the endless concrete structure. This endless night—this, the darkest moment of his life.

And Daryl does not let him beat his head into a pulp against the wall as he so desperately wishes to do, wishes to do so, so he can die.

Daryl does not let him go.

…

Rick wakes to the sound of Carl eating near the end of the sofa, near his boots. He adjusts stiffly, the pain rushing in—he swallows around a tight throat, a dry throat, and regards his son there, sitting on the floor.

“I found some food,” Carl is telling him. Rick does not know how long he had been out, just that it had been long enough for Carl to go through the pasta and pickles from Joe Jr.’s, to need to go out and find more.

“That’s good,” he comments roughly, still far away.

“Killed walkers to get it, too,” Carl says, and Rick feels his stomach flip. He raises a hand to his forehead, feeling the heartbeat return to his swollen eye. He says nothing. Carl takes offense to this—or maybe not offense, but—something had clearly transpired within his son while he was dead to the world. Something had broken and healed over jaggedly. Things had been thought about, decided upon, while he was passed out. Carl says as much with his eyes, his glances—his blame apparent, stark.

“I held onto the belief it could go back to the way it was—for you,” Rick finds himself saying. “For Judith. But now—she’s gone.” He feels this as if a limb were missing from him. As if there was a hole in the center of him where a breeze constantly blew straight through, emphasizing the emptiness every millisecond of every day.

“You’re a man, now. I know this. I’m sorry for treatin’ you otherwise, but you have to understand. I never wanted any of this for you. The things you’ve had to do—” Rick grits his teeth through a sigh that rankles his ribs. “The prison got to a point where it seemed it could sustain somethin’ like peace. And through that, I wanted to protect you from what I could, no matter how stupid it was of me.”

Carl looks at him for a long time. This speech has softened the boy’s eyes, and they are even softer as they regard him, now.

“It’s not stupid, Dad. But it’s just not…” Carl moves his head, searching for the right words. “Not how the world can be, now. Not how people can be.”

Carl seems so grown at times like this, and—Rick supposes he is, despite all his hopes for how the boy would get to grow up, experience only the good in life.

Carl continues. “I don’t want you to bear it all and keep me in the dark. I want to be like Glenn, or Michonne, or Daryl—Want to be able to help you, protect you, too.”

Rick reaches out for his son’s face with his bandaged hand, rubbing some dirt and sweat from the peach fuzz of his cheek with his thumb. The breath rasps in and out of him and he swallows roughly the tears that fill his throat.

“We’ll protect each other, okay?”

Carl nods. Rick drops his hand to the food, pushing more toward Carl as they sit in the dim silence of the living room.

…

He drifts off into an uneasy sleep on the couch as soon as he knows Carl is safe in one of the bedrooms upstairs. Even just conversation and the simple act of bringing food to his mouth, chewing, took all the energy he had.

This sleep is not without dreams, though, as his body fights to repair itself, feverish. This time he dreams of the road to Woodbury, of driving the sage green SUV. He tilts his gaze away from the windshield and into the rear-view, clocking the empty backseat and the scenery retreating as he drives forward over the sun-faded asphalt.

Then a whooshing sound of fast air reaches his ears. He looks to his right and sees Daryl sat there, the man’s attention turned toward the window which is rolled down. He has his arm out, collecting bright sunlight against the skin, and has his hand knifing through the air.

Daryl looks away at the feeling of Rick’s gaze on him, the man’s eyes squinted against the sunlight that makes everything’s outline hazy. A soft, faded flannel covers his chest and arms, rolled up to the elbows, and canvas workpants slightly weather-worn at the knees and heel hems. There is a bandana tied around his neck and tucked into his collar, underneath the thin fringe of deep brown hair almost grazing his shoulders. There is no vest, no crossbow, no guns, no knives except for the hunting blade slid covertly into Daryl’s waistband.

Their eyes meet. Daryl’s lips form a lazy smirk, and that gravel chuckle is humming quietly in his throat.

“Didn’t know it was so easy to distract the driver,” Daryl is saying, leaning forward as he does so. There are soon four fingers gently carding the hair at his temple, and a warm, pleasant shiver runs down Rick’s entire spine as the other man’s breath whispers against the shell of his ear.

“We’re gonna be in trouble if you can’t stop starin’.”

Rick finds himself abruptly slowing the vehicle, pulling off to the shoulder of the two-lane highway and throwing the parking brake on. He laughs and brings Daryl’s grinning face toward his, tilts to eagerly take the mouth there against his own as he disengages his seatbelt.

“Guess we’re always in trouble, then,” Rick murmurs between stubble-edged kisses, maneuvering his body over the gear shift to place a knee on either side of Daryl’s hips. He smirks as the man works at his belt, bends forward to lave a trail of hot, wet kisses against the skin under his naval. Then he is smiling outright as Daryl reaches down to the mechanism that lets the back of the seat fall nearly flat. He encircles an arm around Rick’s lower back, switches their positions to lay him softly, press him firmly, into the surface of the seat.

His laugh quickly turns to a moan in the warm sunlight pouring through the window, Daryl coaxing forth the pleasure from his body as easily as one would tighten a guitar string until it rings true, taut.

When Rick wakes up, he thinks he is in the prison. His hand raises above him to seek the side of Judith’s crib but finds only air, only pain as his battered ribs protest at the stretch. Still sleep-logged, he swears he can feel Daryl’s lingering warmth against him, as if the man had just left to get a bottle of water or take a piss or have a smoke, and will be back at any moment. But more than a moment passes, and Rick remains alone.

Maybe Daryl made it out, after all: This supernatural sense Rick has floats over him in the dimness. He feels Daryl’s life out there, somewhere, and hopes that it is not just hope manifesting this certainty. Nevertheless it comforts him in way, thinking of Daryl surviving, with a place of his own for fletching arrows and hanging herbs to dry. Some wooden structure maybe, protected, safe. Daryl out there despite it all—and he would be, out there, still, despite it all. Rick is sure of this.

It is not yet dawn, and no birds sing—there is nothing in the unfamiliar darkness except for Rick’s own injury-labored breathing, and then, a ringing in his ears as he cries without making a sound.

…

_“You don’t get to come back.”_

The woman’s lilted speech and her soot-smeared face float back to Rick here, as he is, in the prison with Judith woven firmly into his arms. He has just told Hershel about the woman-made-walker, the person he failed to bring grace to after her death. Her suicide.

“You tried to help her, but, no one could,” Hershel is saying as he looks out onto the yard through the bars over the windows in cell block C. “Some people are too far gone.”

Rick nods, shaking as if from a chill. He holds Judith close to the core of him but cannot erase the feeling of despair he had as he watched the woman take her life. When he asked her how many people she killed, and the answer echoed around his skull.

 _“Just me_. _”_

“You’re not,” Hershel intones, meaning it. But there is no easy comfort for Rick to find in those words. “You tried to help her.”

He has not revealed his full truth. He cannot keep it from bubbling to the surface, now.

“How she wound up—I got close to that,” Rick admits. “If I lost Judith, if I lost Carl—”

But Hershel is adamant. “Not then, Rick, not even then. Your boy came back.” Those crease-crinkled eyes regard him resolutely. “You get to come back. You do.”

Rick squints, trying to forget the poison, wizened core of him. He numbs it so far that he even forgets the feeling of the good soil between his fingers and underneath his fingernails. All there is is Judith and her powdery heat, his desperation at having her close. “But, Daryl—”

Hershel is shaking his head in the moonlight. “Daryl’s good,” he confirms softly. “Daryl’s always gonna be good. Because of you. ‘Cause you’re here.”

“No matter if I’m not good? I’m not the man—”

Hershel cuts him off. “Doesn’t matter,” he admits gently. “Rick. You gotta take a good, long look at yourself. Can you see what we… Can you see what he sees in you?”

Rick licks his lips, bouncing Judith gently against his chest. He shakes his head in the negative once, bringing his mouth to his daughter’s head, shielding half of his face, half of his shame.

Hershel sighs. “Then those crops ain’t the only thing you need to be tending to, young man.”

…

The terror runs through him like a false note, so he strums, keeps his fingers on the steel pulse of it, until it is as clear as a clarion call through him. Until it is no longer fear, but clean-burning rage.

The room they’re in waiting to be butchered is bright—he is unaccustomed to places full of darkness being so bright. But the thing is he can see his reflection in the metal trough he’s bent over, can see Daryl’s reflection in it, too. Their gags and struggling amplified, reflected. He feels cold despite the sweat in his hair, dripping down his neck. He feels focused.

Gareth bends in front of him and a bitter, dark garden blooms in his chest, between the ribs barely healed. He does not take those eyes off that clean-shaven, boy-next-door face.

“Had to pull my scouts back before we could see where you stashed it, but, we saw it. And—it was a big bag.” The man has a knife to Bob’s eye. “You really gonna say nothing and let me do this?”

Rick tilts his head, the cold fury running through his veins. “Let me take you out there,” her lowers. “I’ll show you where it is.”

But Gareth just purses his lips. “Yeah—not gonna happen. This might, though.” He moves the knife point closer to Bob’s pupil.

“There’s guns in it.” Rick has started working the sharpened bit of wood from the train car into his bonds. “An AK-47. Forty-four Magnum. Automatic weapons, night scope.” He raises his eyes to the ceiling, movements miniscule, imperceptible, but effective. “There’s a compound bow and—a—a machete. With a red handle.”

He feels the wood point tearing into zip tie, can feel it worming between the joint of the crux where he can just keep slipping it in, slipping it in, to force the crux apart. He lets out a breath, does not let it touch his eyes—the fact that it had just broken, and his hands were free. He could laugh, and almost does, but only lets a smirk cross like a dangerous shadow across his lips.

“That’s what I’m gonna use to kill you.” The words pour out of him as acid leaves fangs. The rage has made him centered, calm. Invincible.

Every move that branched from that one second solidified this in him—that the rage was good, was unadulterated, moving in to burn the shame from him. As a brand it burned—it was a part of him, an inextricable face that moved to cover his own like a mask.

It saved them. It saved Daryl.

As they run through the woods outside the ruined Terminus, as Rick sees Daryl’s body weave through the tree trunks like it was made specifically to do so, Rick feels something solidify inside him. Feels the grotesque garden in his chest.

He’s going to chase that feeling, tend those crops, until it burns him to a crisp.

No matter what it costs him, just to keep the others alive.


	5. The Church

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Takes place during S05E02 – S05E03. TW: Anyone who has been affected by dubious consent or sexual yuck or s/t may want to be careful with this chapter. There is nothing graphic, but Daryl is still affected by what happened with Joe and that weaves itself into his actions throughout. Be safe. <3

The first night after Terminus they gather around a makeshift firepit in the middle of the forest, eating whatever packaged items had been scavenged from their stores during the hurried rush from the burning depot, and a small menagerie of meat that Daryl managed to supply with his hunting.

Daryl sits on the edge while the others catch up—talking as they do, while he, characteristically, remains removed. Rick is firmly woven between Carl and Michonne, Judith invariably cradled in one of their three pairs of arms. Observing like this, he is able to glean what he can of the new members’ personalities, their proclivities, without having to exert the effort of speaking, of small talk. Of explaining his own story.

The fire starts to die after sunset, and the exhausted group sets up dirt beds and begin to drift to sleep. Daryl had volunteered for first watch along with Carol, and Rick passes them each a rifle from the large navy nylon bag, once buried, now unearthed. The red-handled hatchet Rick keeps with him, and they part without much of a word as the night slips over the last light at the horizon.

It is deep night when Carol tosses him a pack of Morleys from where they sit at the base of a great oak. “Found them at that place. They’re kinda smashed.”

“Better than nothin’,” he tells her, tucking them into his vest for later. “Thanks, Carol.”

She nods and proceeds to lean her rifle heavily across her chest, finger ready and laid flat against the trigger as she relaxes into the monotony of taking shift. Daryl follows suit and shoves his gun nose down into the dirt, resting his chin across the hard edge of the stock as he looks, listens. The forest is bluish-black under the scant moonlight filtering through the canopy and nothing makes a sound, not even the lone owl’s wings’ susurrus against the trees as it descends on a mouse or skink flitting through the leaves underfoot.

“Y’haven’t told me why, yet.”

She turns at the low gravel of his voice, raising an eyebrow. “Thought you would’ve heard from him.”

Daryl clears his throat, blinking. “Yeah, I heard it from Rick. Ain’t heard it from you, though.”

The corner of her mouth deepens into an expression of unspeakable difficulty, something only necessitated by need. She thinks she deserved it, Daryl realizes, the exile, and whatever happened on the journey to Terminus. She wanted the pain, the difficulty—saw it as an atonement. With this, Daryl is intimately familiar.

“Don’t know how it’s any different.” She sighs and leans further forward against her knees, adjusting the rifle in her arms.

“It’s different.”

He stares at her evenly, knows she can see him from her peripherals but does not meet his gaze. She shifts, unsettled, before finally saying something.

“I don’t wanna talk about it. I can’t.” Her gaze is a hundred yards long, stretching so far that it threatens to swallow her up. “I just need to forget it.”

Still he stares, waiting for her. Waiting, whether that means more words will come, or less. He does this because the longer he waits, numb, for her to say something, the less he will have to think about his own past, the journey his life took while parted from this group. If she says something, anything, he does not have to. So he stares, and when her face whips toward him, his gaze softens.

“Alright,” he says quietly, looking away. She nods and then looks once more into the surrounding clearing, once more animated, quietly struggling with whatever she is keeping inside, keeping to herself. Then Daryl hears a twig snap in the distance and bolts to his feet, listening and building walls—waiting.

Always waiting for the other shoe to drop.

…

He finds Rick awake after Abraham and Rosita come to take over for him and Carol. The others have holed up away from the orange embers of the campfire, surrounded by a walker fence and under the new group members’ watchful eyes, but Rick remains. Daryl almost scares the other man emerging as he does from the silent shadows, and wonders not for the first time why Rick is so set on not applying what he’d taught him about hunting, tracking, and all the minutiae of both disciplines.

But, they are all tired. This is a truth settled deeply into Daryl’s bones.

“Hey,” he says, voice gone reedy from not using it much over the past few hours. For once Carol was not keen on chatting idly, making kind conversation with him—the kind that usually drew a smile or two, a laugh from him like only she could. He knew something ate at her but could do little else other than sit there, give her company. Maybe that was enough—maybe that was what she needed. Maybe that is what Rick needs, too.

“Hey,” Rick responds, tilting his chin up. He is squatted against a tree trunk, holding himself up on the balls of his feet with his elbows braced against his knees, gathering in his eyes the last of the light from the dying embers. He, too, has a hundred-yard stare.

“Want a smoke?”

Daryl brings out the pack that Carol had tossed him, taking one for himself and holding out the rest for Rick. The man leans forward, stretching across the distance between them to pull one out with his fingertips. Daryl lights his own before tossing his zippo to Rick, who catches it—the man’s brows furrowing at this, perhaps expecting Daryl to cross the distance between them and light it himself, as he was accustomed to. Daryl knows his distance from the other man is obvious, but he moves to sit in the dirt where he stood, choosing to keep this gap instead of coming nearer.

Rick holds the zippo in his fingers after lighting his cigarette, playing with it absently as they sit in the pervading silence: Just the steady, soft clicking of him moving the lid open and closed, open and closed.

“Heard somethin’ out there,” Daryl finally starts. “—well, turns out it wasn’t somethin’. But. Thought you would wanna know anyway,” he manages awkwardly.

Energy and movement coils into the shoulders across from him. “Something, or someone?” Rick is on high alert. Daryl wonders if the wariness will ever leave him, ever settle into something like trust again. He flicks ash off the end of his Morley, not meeting the man’s eyes.

“Somethin’,” Daryl responds. “Just heard. Didn’t see.” He sucks at the filter of his cigarette, exhaling heavily. “I’ll check at first light, though, if that’s what you’re about to tell me to do.”

Rick hums in acknowledgement before falling silent again. Daryl finds himself stealing glances at the other man, finds it hard to believe he is a warm, living thing there across from him. First the post-prison separation, then Terminus—death hanging, always so imminent, and he had not been able to do a thing. Hasn’t been able to do a thing since the Claimers, it seems. It was Carol, it was Rick who freed him. Rick who saved him. Rick who still seems too inaccessible to him, seems too far away to reach with his fingers nor his eyes nor his voice.

He gets tangled in this notion, and almost does not catch the other man’s words as Rick begins to speak.

“Y’know, when you were out there, I thought—thought maybe that you had just gone back into the forest like this.” Rick’s voice is low and soothing. “That you were safe—alone, but okay. Hoped you had found somewhere to hole up and made it your own. Started something good for yourself. Sustaining. Enough. I dunno,” Rick sighs, finally turning to look at him. “It was a crazy thought, but, it was what I wanted for you.”

Daryl looks at him for a long time, Rick’s eyes shining just barely in the blackness of the forest, illuminated occasionally by the ember of the cigarette as he brings it to his lips.

Then Daryl feels his mouth open. “Without you?”

Rick’s brow knits again and he shifts against the trunk, softly crunching leaves underfoot.

“No, man—lemme get this straight,” Daryl continues. “In your brightest hope for me, you ain’t even there?” He sucks at the filter of his cig. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

Rick snaps the zippo lid closed, then open, the cigarette left hanging from the corner of his mouth. “Nothin’, Daryl. Was just a thought I had while I thought I was gonna—while I couldn’t be there.”

Daryl inhales but his chest feels tight. He doesn’t know why he feels like this and wishes he could just reach out to Rick, pull him to his chest, but he is not ready for that. He cannot imagine the consequence of putting his lips to the other man’s mouth, the buried terrors it would raise from him now, of Joe and what he did. What they did.

“You okay?” The other man’s voice floats to him across this indefinable distance.

“No, Rick,” he bites, drawing himself up from the dirt and moving his palms against the backs of his thighs, moving his ankles to adjust the thin strings tied around the hems of his canvas pants. “Not at all.”

“Daryl, wait.” Rick’s hand is going to the trunk behind him, steadying him, helping him halfway to his feet. He holds out the zippo for Daryl to take. “Tell me what you need.”

“Can’t,” Daryl replies, shooting forward to retrieve the lighter then quickly stepping away. Rick stops mid-movement. Daryl scoffs at this, not knowing what he was expecting, being so full of thorns; not knowing what he wants or needs in this moment. It is no wonder Rick is unable to supply it to him right away, as bereft as he is of exactly what it would take to make these mistakes, make what happened to him boil away, disappear.

“Don’t wait up in the mornin’. I’ll find y’all.”

He starts to stalk off without a second glance over his shoulder. Leaves Rick there.

…

Daryl waits until the dawn breaks, searching for signs of being watched, until the creatures start to scurry from their homes. Five dead squirrels later, strung by their tails and thrown over his shoulder, and he is hot on the heels of the group—can tell by their footprints, the louder noises of the indelicate Eugene, Abraham, Tara, and even Rick, still a piss-poor tracker.

He has not really let anything settle into the sea inside him. It is all still there, detritus, floating.

He is within five feet of them, emerging from the brush, before they all train their guns on him. He raises his hands, the string of dead squirrels swaying in the warm breeze blowing by.

“We surrender.”

No one has rested enough to laugh. They all just lower their weapons, continue walking. Even Rick’s gaze is half relieved, half stony. It seems like he did not know if Daryl would return, and spent the rest of the night thinking this, and now does not know if Daryl will join him by his side. But Daryl does. He moves to do so, and he and Rick fall into a matching gait as they lead the group through the trees.

“No tracks—no nothin’,” he tells the other man.

“So, whatever you heard last night—”

“It’s more what I felt,” he interrupts, harsher than intended. He is gentler as he continues, clarifies, “If someone was watchin’ us, there would’ve been something to find.”

Rick’s eyes slide to his. In the early morning light, the gaze that meets his softens for only a moment, melting between the dark red scabs on the man’s temple, his cheekbone.

Daryl looks away as the other man begins to turn his shoulder, falling back to address the rest of the group as he continues forward, adjusting the squirrels over his shoulder. He feels Rick putting as much distance between them as possible, knows that realistically this is so he can bring up the rear while Daryl protects the vanguard—but cannot help wondering otherwise.

 _So sensitive_ , he reprimands himself, eyes cutting through the viridescent foliage and stinging with sweat. Was it always this way?

No, this—this is new. This is like circling back to the beginning, to the tension and the uncertainty he had first shared with Rick before the farm. Before Carol’s friendship. Before Dale. He shoots a gaze over his shoulder as Bob and Sasha chat behind him, as Carol walks up to slip her hand over his bare shoulder and squeeze comfortingly. He takes his eyes from Rick next to Glenn at the back of the group, moves them to Carol’s kind face.

This is like starting over.

…

Even though he volunteers for the run to the food pantry, volunteers even to stay and help Carl watch Judith, keep an eye out for this priest’s possible friends, Rick tells him it isn’t necessary. He’s going with Michonne to the pantry, and Tyreese is more than capable of holding down the fort with Carl. It is only Carol’s socially elegant suggestion of collecting water from the nearby stream that cuts the tension growing between them, allows Daryl to breathe somewhat normally as they bend in the banks of the clear, rushing water that the priest had visited so many times before, and never gotten sick.

“You don’t wanna talk, I get it,” Daryl eventually murmurs, worrying this silence between he and Carol will stretch infinitely into the future unless he does something about it. “Just let me know, are you okay?”

She caps a gallon jug, pushing it further up the bank behind her before grabbing another empty. “Have to be,” she responds simply, not looking at him.

Daryl chews his inner cheek. Downstream from her, his jug takes much longer to fill. Risking pushing it too far, he continues, “Whatever happened, happened. Let’s start over.”

Her eyes are clear as she finally meets his gaze. She knits her brow, leans back on her heels. “I want to.”

“Well, you can.”

She moves her head to the side in a long sweep, succinct, suggesting that it is just not that simple. That she wishes it were, but it is not. Daryl knows this, but hoped it would be different—for if Carol could, if Carol would, then he could—he would. But it is not a choice, no. There is no grace, no forgiveness, here.

“I know,” he murmurs to her as they start packing up, getting back on the road to the church. “I know it can’t be like that. That all there is to fix it is time—maybe, maybe a fire. I don’t know.”

Now it is her turn to watch him as he stares at the overgrown dirt path back to the road.

“Is that why you burned it down?”

A jug of water slips comedically from his hand mid-gesture. It so offsets the seriousness of his tone that Carol’s face cracks open. It is the first time since their reunion after Terminus that he has seen Carol smile. The first time he’s seen her smile without tears in his eyes.

“Well, it’s not the same as you letting me borrow your bike, but. It’ll do,” she mocks him, referring to his momentary awkwardness.

“Ain’t nothing that can’t be fixed with a ride, huh?” he says. He hasn’t thought of the Triumph since leaving the prison, and he misses it, acutely.

“Maybe not that kind of ride,” she jokes, shoving her arm into his as they walk. He chuckles darkly at her playful tone, shoving back.

“Stop.”

…

It is not yet dusk and he, Rick, Carol and Gabriel move about the one-room church to prepare everything for the 14-person dinner. The others are either at the short bus or around the perimeter—Glenn, Tara, Abraham, Rosita, and Eugene flexing their mechanical knowledge, while Maggie, Sasha, Michonne, Carl, Tyreese, and Bob set about clearing the immediate area. Food is emptied, as prepared as it can be, into large bowls from the community pantry, wine brought up from the half-cellar’s coolness and set about the barrier in front of the pulpit for easy access.

The candles, too, are brought from storage—the tall, white, seven-day burners, as well the ones that were designated for use in the bathroom with their gourmand, seaside, and deep forest scents mixing into the dust of Gabriel’s year-long home.

Daryl moves about with his zippo, bringing a flame to each wick like an Olympic torch being transferred from one hand to the next. He notices Rick muttering and shaking the cheap plastic lighter he was given, clicking the flint over and over with no luck. So he crosses the distance between them, takes the pillar candle gently from Rick’s hands.

“Let me help,” he murmurs, brushing his shoulder against Rick’s as he pivots and brings the flame from his zippo into existence like a breath exhaled. Rick is jarred by his sudden closeness, he can tell, and does not know what to do other than press back into his shoulder with his own, whisper.

“Thanks, brother.”

Because of this, Daryl lingers longer than necessary and sees Rick’s shoulders relax, sees his eyelids flutter closed for just a moment, there in front of the hanging cross in the apse of the church. Daryl presses more intentionally, swinging his body deeper into the other’s personal space before separating to move on to the next task.

But he watches over his shoulder as he goes, watches Rick tilt his head and blink softly—silently communicating the returned, shared warmth. Daryl’s heart goes like a rubber band almost too far stretched, pain welling in the face of familiarity and remembered joy.

This is Rick—his Rick.

Daryl gets his hands dirty helping Carol with the dishes, clawing and sawing off container tops as she mixes the right amount of seasoning and ingredients. It is not long before Judith is crying in her bassinet, a repurposed, linen-lined basket that once held toilet paper rolls in the bathroom.

Daryl dries his hands by flicking them into the air, moving quickly at the sounds of Judith’s just-starting warbles. He bends over her where she is on a front-row pew, scooping her and her reddening face up into his arms as Gabriel looks on from where he had also been advancing, merely a few feet away. Daryl’s eyes shift from Gabriel’s to Rick’s as he lifts Judith to his shoulders, returns Rick’s approving nod as he walks around the nave with her. Hushing, shushing, bouncing.

It takes much longer than usual, Judith’s crying echoing into the vaulted ceiling even after Carol moves to slip something mashed in a spoon past her tiny mouth. Daryl sits, leaned against the end of a pew, trying to keep her occupied and entertained with strange voices and faces, to little avail. Even the gentle kisses he peppers against her full, tear-stained cheeks do nothing.

Eventually, Rick approaches where he sits. “I can give you a break.”

Daryl clears his throat, rubbing Judith’s back. “No need,” he says. “She ain’t any trouble.”

“Hopefully it stays like that, huh?” Rick responds with a wry smile. Daryl snorts, wants to smile back—but his mouth is heavy, so he moves to place it against Judith’s forehead instead, then boosts her up as Rick bends down, arms extended, to lift her up. Rick regards her face for a moment, making some silly expression at her, then, almost as an afterthought, reaches down with his right hand to brush a few fingers against Daryl’s ear, his jaw. Daryl feels some kind of shock go through him at the gesture, reminded of the soft kiss that Rick placed against the edge of his mouth so long ago, at the prison, thanking him for the gift of the mp3 player.

Daryl meets Rick’s eyes, burning blue over Judith’s small shoulder. He stares until Rick removes himself, then decides he cannot simply sit there the rest of the night, what with the sun rapidly receding toward the horizon, and a mass of people counting on the work he does now.

But, still, he carries this gesture with him, carries it as he would something like hope.

…

After Abraham’s speech, Daryl slips outside the church’s double doors, unnoticed. Everyone is celebrating, reveling in the new purpose brought unto them by Rick’s decision to entertain Abraham’s desire to go to D.C., Eugene’s assurance that there is something to be salvaged from all of this. Daryl resists playing the pessimist, resists saying, as usual, when things sound too good to be true. Because, this time, he really wants them to be true. Despite his better instinct, wants this for everyone—wants this desperately for Rick, Carl, and Judith.

Even if an end to it all would mean an end to this family, too.

He flicks the flint of his zippo against the end of a Morley, bringing it to his lips as he sinks against the siding of the church. He has managed to move silently out here, move deep into the shadows of the building while the brightness of candles flicker and gutter within the tall, half-shuttered windows just above the crown of his skull. He sits for a long time listening to the soft sounds of voices inside.

“Thought I saw you come out here.”

Daryl raises his head, tilting it back until it rests against the stone foundation of the church as he exhales his small cloud of cigarette smoke. Rick approaches through the shadows, and his gait is a little off kilter. Daryl says nothing and watches the man, his expression easy.

“You wanna be alone?”

Daryl shakes his head. “Nah.” His cigarette is almost gone, and he takes a last drag before extinguishing it in the dirt to his right side. “C’mon.”

Rick takes this invitation, lowering himself down on Daryl’s left side. He leans back against the church, mirroring Daryl’s stance, and they sit like this for some time staring up into the evening sky and all its stars.

Daryl eventually reaches into his pocket for his pack of Morleys, extracting another cig. He lights it and inhales deeply, then passes the filter to Rick.

“Do you think—d’you think you’ve let anythin’ go, in order to survive?” Rick asks thoughtfully before bringing the filter to his lips. He is not looking at Daryl, and Daryl can see the slight slowed movements the other man makes, knows the wine has affected him. He clears his throat.

“Like?” he responds. Rick gives the cigarette back, fingertips gentle against his own.

“I dunno. Bob was talkin’ to me on that run and… He said something that made think that maybe I—maybe I been able to let go in a way that’s not so bad. In a way that lets me—lets us—live.”

Daryl furrows his brow, navigating into the labyrinth of thought this makes in his mind. He does not realize how silent he’s being until he says, “You’re—different. Still you, but also—changed.”

He thinks about the chill that ran through him in the darkness of that Terminus box car when Rick said, _They’re gonna feel pretty stupid when they realize they’re fuckin’ with the wrong people._ He saw a leader come back into being, the man he knew. He recalls strength, purpose, _happiness_. But, also, the rage, the danger, the fine line toed between these things. Maybe it was about something being sacrificed so something else could come into existence, after all.

“You ever feel like that?”

Daryl inhales, lets the nicotine settle deep into his lungs and his limbs. Rick is looking at him, expression open and honest, expecting an answer, but he does not feel like going there. Not yet.

“You’re drunk off two glasses, aren’t you?” he taunts instead of replying, to which Rick tilts the corner of his mouth up. “That’s one thing that ain’t different. Y’never can hold your booze.”

“That’s fair,” Rick responds, a light laugh in his voice. The filtered candlelight plays across his features, turning them golden and midnight blue. “But me bein’ drunk or not, got nothin’ to do with how beautiful you are, ri’ now.”

Daryl stares at the man’s face, looming in front of him in the dark. It has gone soft and awed, blue eyes running over every aspect of his beaten face. They stare at one another like this until Rick’s slim fingertips gently push a lock of his hair away from his black eye. Daryl lets them—doesn’t jolt away. Then Rick is leaning forward, lightly brushing his lips over the bruised skin, and Daryl feels a sigh escape him. He almost drops the cigarette between his fingers, forgetting about anything other than the feeling of Rick’s soft breath panning out against his cheek, about the feeling of the man sidled near him and warm, wanting to touch him, wanting him.

Then his mouth is moving, unbidden. “Rick, wait—”

The man withdraws curiously, brows knit with concern.

“Just listen,” Daryl demands gently. “I need you to hear this.” He takes in a breath and holds it in his lungs. “Back at the quarry, when Merle and me joined the group, we—” _Fuck. Fucking say it_. He brings the cigarette up to his mouth but all he inhales is ash, the ember gone out.

“We were gonna rob them.”

Rick’s eyes search his face, and the man licks his lip in confusion. His mouth opens and then closes, withdrawing just an inch from his proximity to Daryl’s body.

“I never knew when to tell you, but, y’needed to know. I needed you to know.” He takes in a shaky breath, preparing for it all to come crashing down around him. He flicks the flint of his zippo quickly, shakily trying to reignite the half-smoked cig. The sizzle of paper being eaten up by fire, turned into carbon, is almost too loud to bear.

Daryl finally says, “Wanted to start over.”

Rick is shifting his weight against his thigh, reaching forward and to take the cigarette with one hand. Then there are four fingers running through his hair, pushing it back from his face.

“Daryl,” Rick says with his half-drunken voice full. “You should’ve let that go a long time ago, brother.”

Daryl raises his eyes to Rick’s. The man rubs the pad of his thumb against the farthest point of his cheekbone where it meets the inner ear, caressing. He brings the cigarette to his own lips, inhaling.

“That might’a been Merle, but that’s never been you.”

Daryl closes his eyes and swallows, dropping his head in a nod. He lets his breath out, though not all the way. Can’t seem to let it out all the way.

Rick sees this, just like he always does. He passes the cigarette back and Daryl’s heart beats, shallow and fast, jumping in the back of his throat.

“That ain’t all though, is it? You were actin’ like a stranger, before.”

Daryl swallows, nodding, smoking, acknowledging this but unable to bring his eyes to Rick’s. He knows that he should explain—owes it to Rick. Not even owes it, but knows that Rick would understand. Rick would be there, always, with his gentle acceptance. His next inhale is stilted by whatever foreign fear runs through him, despite it.

“I did somethin’ I—I didn’t want—” He blows a breath from his nose, leaning his head back against the siding of the church once more.

“It’s okay, Daryl. I’m right here.”

When it comes out it is not a rush—it is quieter than he ever expected. Rick sitting patiently next to him and the cigarette seeping smoke out in a thin ribbon, floating, toward the black and diamond pinprick sky.

“I let somethin’ happen ‘cause I thought I deserved it. Wanted to feel anythin’ besides the loss of—of losin’ you. Thought I had the pain comin’ to me for not bein’ able to—”

 _Not being able to save you_.

He stubs the cigarette out against the dirt they sit in, shutting his eyes tightly, not knowing what else to do.

“I know, brother,” Rick voice floats to him in the darkness. “I know what you mean. Thought I was gonna lose you, after I thought I already had lost you. It hurt.”

Daryl can see his reflection in the silvery blood troth, can feel the presence of the butcher and the baseball bat at Terminus.

“And all I could think kneeling next to you was—and I _hated_ them for it, for taking it away from me—that I was never gonna touch you, like this, again.”

Daryl’s eyes flash open, and the held tears move to roll down his face. He’s never seen Rick’s face so wanting, so gentle.

“Can I…?” Rick is murmuring, and Daryl is nodding without thinking, desperate for closeness, scooping the man onto his lap as Rick moves to straddle him. Just the whispers of fabric and friction sound in the clearing as Rick sidles into place, his scant weight pressing down into Daryl’s lap and the heat there. When the growing hardness trapped in his jeans throbs against Daryl’s lower abdomen, he almost writhes as a trapped animal would—has to remind himself that this is Rick. How can he remind himself that this is Rick?

He grapples with Rick’s jacket’s zipper track’s many teeth, moves forward swiftly at the same time he pulls the other man to him. He knows he is being rough but Rick is so gentle that it does not matter—the man matching him, countering him, allowing him.

They kiss. Daryl can taste the wine, blackberry sweet, on Rick’s tongue as he slips his own past those two lips. He slides both his palms up the plane of Rick’s back to his shoulder blades, right hand moving farther still to cradle the nape of the man’s neck close. He brushes his fingers to the curls that disappear there below the white sherpa lining of the man’s corduroy coat, taking in all these new textures with the old. Rick’s hair still feels the same, and as they carry out the familiar rhythm of the kiss, Daryl’s closed eyes fill once more with tears.

It is not long before he is spit-slick and slipping inside Rick, their clothing disheveled at their attempts to press closer, hands roaming. Rick rocks in his lap, slowly lowering, tight and hot around him. They have not stopped kissing for more than a few moments of adjustment. It is deep, soft, wanting, edged by teeth points and quiet breaths. Daryl’s eyes are leaking tears in earnest as Rick cups his jaw close, holds him to this kiss as if it were a remedy—and in a way, it is. Daryl feels taken care of; Rick coaxing the pleasure forth from him in an attentive, honoring way. He opens himself to it—sinks into Rick’s ministrations, his hips, his palms, his mouth, his taste, his scent. Everything about it familiar and good; the pressure around his piece, the pressure of Rick’s lips against his.

“This okay, Daryl?” The other man’s voice has already abandoned itself to the pleasure he is feeling.

Daryl hums against Rick’s ear and feels the shiver run through the man, feels his cock jump against his stomach. “Yeah, darlin’. It’s more than okay.”

Rick is in control of it, every move, so Daryl gives himself over. Rick rides him, bringing him deep within as Daryl lets a groan vibrate in his throat. Just when Daryl thinks he cannot go deeper Rick takes him, takes every bit of him into his tight heat with a delicate, rhythmic panting escaping his mouth. Daryl covers Rick’s length with his palm and tries to match those swallowing hips’ movements with his own.

As Rick holds his face close Daryl moves his fingers carefully underneath the man’s shirt, aching to feel more of his skin against his own. He runs his bitten-short nails through the light down covering Rick’s chest, the other man’s heart pulsing under his palm. The beating of it is ardent and eager, and he presses impossibly against it as Rick shifts to take him in, to make him move against the spot that brings a quiet cry of pleasure from his lips.

Daryl tilts his chin down, latching his kiss-swollen mouth to the beating pulse in Rick’s neck. He laves his tongue hotly, sucks, knowing exactly what Rick likes, savoring the familiar saltiness of his skin. He moves his lips up the length of Rick’s bared neck, kissing at the crux of jaw and beard and earlobe and inhaling deeply as Rick moves himself again and again toward that spot deep inside of him, Daryl’s hand a vice around Rick’s cock.

Every movement is slick and smooth and so _right_ that the ecstasy bottles up in him, spills over him like fever chills—electric shudders of desire, of warmth and depth and wetness.

They both reach climax together, gripping at each other, guiding the effortless, searing ebb and flow of pleasure from their bodies’ movements into and against one another. They breathe hard, not shifting, not loosening the fervent clutch that adheres them together.

Daryl kisses Rick’s sweaty temple, where the other man has leaned his forehead against his collarbone. He wants to tell Rick how much he needed him, how much it means to him. Rick lifts from him for a moment, drawing his jeans back on, and Daryl reaches down to do the same to his own. The other man stays close to him, their thighs touching, when Rick’s fingers grasp his right hand and intertwine.

“You okay?” Rick murmurs. He lays his head against Daryl’s shoulder, pressing closer to the heat of him.

“Yeah,” Daryl replies. He means it. “I am, Rick. You?”

Rick hums, lifting their joined digits and pressing his lips to the back of Daryl’s hand for a long moment. He rubs his thumb over the scar in his palm, the scar he made with Joe’s knife.

“Thank you,” he murmurs.

Daryl buries his nose in Rick’s curls. “I should be the one thankin’ you.”

Rick shakes his head slightly. “Whatever happened to you out there… wasn’t just because you thought I had died. That wasn’t the only reason.”

“What d’you mean?” Daryl murmurs back.

“You’re different, too. Changed.” Rick lifts his head up to look into his eyes. “I don’t think you touch just anyone the way you touch me.”

“You neither.”

Something shifts behind Rick’s eyes, and it takes a full moment before the meaning of this dawns on Daryl. It is as if he missed a step on a staircase, heart plummeting into his stomach before his foot finds solid ground underneath the surface of the man’s words.

“You sayin’… What’re you sayin’, Rick?”

Rick, hesitant, brings their mouths together once more. Daryl is made delirious by the firmness of Rick’s tongue slipping past his lips, wanton in his acceptance of Rick’s gentle crawl into his arms. He holds the other man close to him as the kiss deepens, pressing the heel of his hand against Rick’s cheek as he grasps his fingers into the hair just behind Rick’s ear.

When the separate they leave their foreheads together, leaning into one another as they catch their breath. Soon Rick is smiling, that serious face breaking into a bright, boyish expression. Daryl traces the corners of it with his fingertips, memorizing, parting his lips as a thought forms, brings itself from the back of his throat.

But before he can say anything, a body is passing by on the outskirts of the window’s illumination. They both jolt, hands moving swiftly to their weapons before they realize it is Carol. She moves silently, purposefully to the edge of trees surrounding the church, without seeing where they are hidden in the shadows.

Daryl does not like the way her shoulders look—how determined they are, coupled with the pack she carries, slung over one side.

“Does she look like she’s—?” Worry is edging his voice.

“Yeah,” Rick agrees, immediate.

Daryl is pulling his crossbow over his shoulder and already half-standing when Rick reaches up to grab his wrist.

“Be careful,” is all the man can manage.

Daryl nods, then he is bending down to kiss Rick once more, briefly. Rick winds their fingers together where he sits, face shadowed, features resolute when Daryl withdraws.

“I know,” Daryl murmurs, standing, backing away. Their arms stretch out across this distance, pulling taut, until there is nothing left to offer up and Rick’s fingers slip from his.

Without another word, Daryl turns and follows Carol into the forest.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So, I'll be making tweaks to Forgiveness and Weakness (latter may turn into a chaptered piece, lots of stuff there to flesh out), and then publish a seventh installment oneshot… then, Poison Arrow will be… done? Can’t believe it. I don’t wanna let it go. :,-( 
> 
> This is the first time in many, many years I’ve been able to write anything at all, much less 120K in four months. Truly wasn’t expecting this to turn into what it did after that spontaneous hayloft oneshot back in November, when I first started watching TWD. Thank you for reading/subscribing/leaving kudos/comments. Only thing better than writing is getting to share it with you all. <3


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